The Ping Pong Printer

Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group built an inkjet printer for ping pong balls:

Why print on boring old paper, when you can get your message across on some nice bouncy ping pong balls? The appropriately named PingPongPrinter can print dot-matrix messages directly onto the spherical surface of ping pong balls.

Builders Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group used a Parallax inkjet print head kit and the EFX-TEK Prop-2 controller board to bring their wondrous creation to life. As each ball leaves the hopper, it’s loaded onto a rotating platform, and sprayed with tiny ink droplets.

The best part: the balls it prints are used as ammunition for the group’s other dastardly invention, the pneumatic, ping pong ball firing PONGINATOR!

Check out technabob blog for the video clip of the PingPongPrinter in action and the awesome giant PONGINATOR: Link