Nog Pong
We teamed up with our friends at Saatchi LA to create the cure for the common holiday card- a game that we called "Nog Pong." Deeplocal built the "NogBot" robot and allowed users to aim and control the bot to fire ping-pong balls into cups of eggnog. Real robot, real ping-pong balls, real eggnog. A live video feed on nogpong.com let users watch and interact with the game in real-time. Every time a user sunk a shot, a Saatchi employee took a drink and a donation was made to three preselected charities.
Nogbot started as an off-the-shelf ping-pong practice machine. In one weekend, we reverse engineered the machine and replaced its guts with our own wiring and microcontroller. The new microcontroller allowed us to programmatically control the motors, switches and servos to do our bidding. We created a web-based API to communicate with Nogbot allowing an external program to fire balls at different speeds and directions.