# More than 300 parts and six motors for one task: bouncing a ball on a bat

> Hackaday features T-Kuhn's hexa-bouncer, a robotic platform made largely of aluminium and built for a single task: bouncing a ball.

Published on 2026-10-13

For Hackaday, this is a very impressive robot devoted to a most mundane task. The site probably sees it as the most needlessly sophisticated machine it has come across this week.

Six stepper motors, each fitted with a planetary gearbox, each drive one arm. Clever linkages let the machine move a table tennis bat in every direction, in both rotation and translation.

A Teensy 4.0 board coordinates the motors, but the commands come from a PC. Software built with Unity and published on GitHub calculates the arm movements from two cameras that track the ball in 3D.

The machine is largely made of aluminium milled on T-Kuhn's CNC milling machine. Each arm needs 27 aluminium parts, not counting those in the base. In total, the assembly exceeds 300 parts.

According to Hackaday, T-Kuhn had developed this machine vision method of tracking the ball on another of his robots, called octo-bounce.

## Sources

- [Hackaday (Robots)](https://hackaday.com/2026/10/12/the-hexa-bouncer-may-be-the-most-overengineered-thing-you-see-this-week/)

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