Willy Wonka’s Weapon of Choice: The Confectionary Cannon

This is what happens when you give four college students $250 and assign them three months to come up with something for their Principles of Engineering class. 

Referred to as the Confectionary Cannon, this fun candy weapon uses marshmallows as its ammo and can fire six soft, squishy projectiles at its target in less than 10 seconds. 

What’s more, to calculate the distance to a target, the group included a webcam and employed Python API of OpenCV to detect how far away a person is by sizing up the individual’s face.

In terms of actual functionality, from the group’s site:

To control our mechanical and pneumatic system we developed a robust electrical system. We use a custom protoshield on our Arduino to connect and control our four servos, and we trigger our pneumatic launcher by controlling a solenoid on a sprinkler valve.

Also worth noting is that the cannon is outfitted with all of the appropriate servos and gears to allow for roughly 200 degrees of horizontal and 60 degrees of vertical motion for aiming. 

Now, it’s one thing to read about the cannon and check out some still images of it in action, but something entirely else to actually see it in action. Check out the video below that the group put together of their Confectionary Cannon in action. It’s some pretty sweet stuff! (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

Story via confectionarycannon.com