IMPOSSIBLE To Hit Baseball Pitch!

I've come to the realization that Major League  Baseball pitchers are basically superhuman. Xbox Game Pass challenged us to surpass the  superhuman abilities of professional pitchers. So I built this. We do a lot of projects around superheroes like Iron Man Captain America Spider-man... but not all heroes wear capes. Some wear cleats. And the ability to throw one of these 100  miles an hour that's damn near superhuman. Xbox Game Pass sponsored this  video so I could be an MLB star. If you want to experience being an  MLB star check out MLB The Show 21. It's out on Xbox and Xbox Game Pass. Link in the description below. The general idea behind pitching  is to throw the ball into this area and make it as difficult as  possible for the batter to hit. A 100 mile an hour fastball reaches  home plates in under 400 milliseconds,   the swing itself takes 150 milliseconds so that leaves the batter  just a quarter of a second   to see the pitch to decide whether  or not to swing, and where to swing. In addition to throwing really really fast,  pitchers can curve the ball by adding spin. What boggles my mind is pitchers  need to compensate for the amount   of curve to hit a small target 60 feet away. All while throwing as fast as humanly possible. The average fastball is 93 miles per hour but  I wonder how fast mere mortals can throw... and completely miss. 48. 62! Alright I'm getting better. 51 whatever 62 51. 54. 61. 68. I'll take it I'll take it. Nothing. 44. Not bad. So none of us can throw 90 miles an hour  obviously but what does 90 actually look like? We're here at VELO Baseball in Kitchener Ontario. State-of-the-art training facility where  serious baseball players come to train. We're here to find out what  90 miles an hour looks like. Let's take some swings. This is Tyler, who can throw 92 miles an hour. Oh boy. I kind of want to hit one. I don't think it's going to happen. Oh! Outside. Outside is better than inside. This is crazy. Alright I got you. I got you. Let's go. Up the middle James you ready? As long as I don't cross  this line I'll be fine right? How's it feeling so far? It's not too bad. Oh Oh How's it going? It hurts. Go right on that the side. You want to see it in slow motion to distract you? No. Not your fault. So we came here to see and and feel what  what 90 mile per hour fastball feels like. And I can tell you it hurts. So I'm gonna go to the hospital. I guess we have a title for the video though. Alright see ya see ya take  care hope your hand is good. I think it's fair to say that I  am not a professional athlete. But I am an engineer so I'm going to enable cheat   mode and make a pitching machine  that has some unfair advantages. To do that I need speed spin and accuracy. Let's do some math. The faster you pitch the less  time the batter has to react. But how fast do we need? Well velocity equals distance over time. The quickest human reaction  time is about 150 milliseconds. It takes another 150  milliseconds to swing the bat. The pitching distance is 60 feet and 6 inches  so if I can pitch at 140 miles per hour or more then the batter will have no time  to gauge whether or not to swing. So this is what I came up with in Solidworks. I've designed these wheels to spin at 10 000 RPM  which is a surface speed of 240 miles per hour. So what about curve? Well the faster the spin the more the  ball will curve, due to the Magnus effect. By spinning one wheel faster than the  others I can get any curve that I want. As for accuracy, that's easy. I'll just add a laser sight. As an added bonus I've decided to  make this thing fully automatic so if all else fails I can just  strike out the batter with rapid fire. Let's get started. I need a shaft to mount the flywheel  to and I need it to adapt to the motor   so that the motor can drive it. So I'm going to use the lathe to drill  a hole and then cut a keyway into it. But I also need a keyway from the motor shaft to  the shaft and I need to cut that using a brooch. This little keyway fits in the slot. Slides right on there with  the keyway that we just cut. And now it can't rotate relative to the motor. To hold the wheel I need some bearings. To hold the bearings I need to  machine a housing out of this plate. They should be able to hold the wheel now. Yeah works great. Now I just need to make five more of them. MGM controllers hooked us up with these  beautiful little speed controllers and   despite their small size they can output  180 amps continuous or 11 kilowatts. Which is pretty crazy. It's actually double what the motors can  handle so what I'm going to do is solder on these little three prong connectors  so that I can connect it to the motor. I've got all my parts together  just have to put it all together. It should be fun. This is the motor adapter plate. It screws on there with these holes. I want to spin it up make sure that it doesn't   vibrate itself to pieces,  so let's give that a shot. This is just one of the three motors. Yeah it's a little shaky. This is maybe 20% power. Yeah I'm uh I'm scared to go higher than that. I was really hoping that I could get away without  balancing them but I guess that was just naive. Definitely need to balance them before  spin all three of them up while holding it   because that'll just vibrate itself to pieces. This machine measures the balance and  tells you how much weight to add and where. Pretty cool. In this case we just removed  material instead of adding material. The wheels were terribly unbalanced  but they should be a lot better now. Yeah it's significantly better. It's still a little a little  scary but much better. Let's see how it does. Was awesome but also a little terrifying  because it was only 20% power. So this thing spinning at full  speed...that's a future problem. Next I need a way to hold the baseballs  and feed them into the launcher. Let's start with a hopper. A clear tube should work. As much as I like rapid fire,  I need a way to index the balls   and feed them into the launcher one at a time. I've prototyped some designs and I  think I've settled on a solution. Let me show you in Solidworks. The basic idea here is to have a gear  motor feed one ball in at a time. To do that I've got an interference  fit with a timing belt. Once I turn on the gear motor  and it forces them through and the issue I was having previously  and why I had so many iterations   is that the ball was getting  stuck at the very end. It would just kind of sit there that's why  I have this tiny tiny sprocket right here. This is my fourth and hopefully final design. It's currently being 3D printed  so we'll see how it works. Now I need a way to hold this so I'm going to  laser cut a frame and 3D print some handles. Let's get started. That's better but it's very heavy. Once we get the rest of it on center of  gravity will be closer to your shoulder,   it'll be much easier to hold. With the hopper done it's  time for the electronics. Cable management is important. My plan for this was just to squish it altogether. Exterior cable management. I've got that down but interior  stuff, oh, it's gonna be tight. So I got the whole thing put  together and I fired some balls   and it wasn't firing as fast as I wanted because the wheels were slipping on the ball. And to fix that I took it  apart. I remade the plates. I moved the wheels closer together so it would  squish the ball more and I put it back together. And it didn't work. Same problem. So I took it apart and I did it again and  then I did it again and it still doesn't work! It still slips on the ball. It's about 12 o'clock at night  I've had way too much caffeine   and I'm running out of ideas  of how to fix this thing. I think I'm gonna take it apart again. It's been about two weeks of late nights  but it's done or at least it better be done because I haven't tested it  yet but I think it's done. I've rebuilt this thing countless times,  changed out the wheels, changed out to the   each these parts. I had to remake because I moved  everything closer together. We made all of these 3D printed parts. I had to re-laser cut these. Rewired it. It's all together. I have a full bin of failed prototype parts. Oh man this thing is heavy. All we got to do now is test it out. Ready Darryl? This video is sponsored by Xbox Game Pass. The monthly game subscription service  that offers gamers a library of over   100 high quality games on their  console, PC and Android devices. All for one low monthly price. Xbox Game Pass subscribers get all the benefits of  Xbox Live Gold and can play a ton of great games. Enjoy blockbuster titles like  Halo Infinite or Psychonauts 2   the minute they release on  console for no additional cost. Discover your next favorite  game such as MLB The Show 21. Experience faster deeper and more intense  moment-to-moment action on the field with a   variety of game modes for all you rookie  players and returning seasoned vets. Unleash your creativity to build something  truly epic with the new Stadium Creator mode. Be sure to click the link in the description  below to learn more about MLB The Show 21.  The historic sports franchise out  now on Xbox and Xbox Game Pass. Safety first. Hacksmith.store. For our first test let's see  how destructive this thing is. That's safety rated glass. No there's no shards on the inside. It got stuck inside of her. Here let's see what this does to some drywall. Concrete bricks. That was awesome let's take this  thing to a field and play some ball. Yeah go Ian! Sports harder! That was fun, definitely definitely  further than I can throw. I was on like third power. These are the speed controllers for each  individual motor and we're at about a third. And that's that's full power right there. Zero power. Full power. So I can control the spin by controlling  each individual motor, so for example   if I just want like a top spin  there just one motor going. Maybe I want like a bit of side there we go. Want a knuckle ball? All three the same. Last time was a knuckle ball because  I didn't have any spin on it. This time I've adjusted it to have a top spin. Yes Alright this should be a breaking ball. See how fast this thing can go. 70. 77. Little faster. 70. It's actually going slower  with the wheels going faster   because there's uh there's actually less  friction when it's kinetic friction. So I'm going to turn it down a bit  see if we can get a little faster with   slower wheels because that makes sense. So 77 was the fastest I hit right there which is  definitely faster than what I can throw by hand. But the issue I'm having is it's  still just slipping on the ball you   see all that smoke coming out that it's  shredding the ball as it launches it. So as you saw the faster I turned the  wheels the slower the ball actually went. There's just one last thing  to do. Let's hit some balls. Alright Ian don't hit my other hand. Hold still. Oh that was close. Okay let's give it a go. That's not even padded. I know. For safety reasons I'm actually using soft balls   so that one didn't actually hurt  as much as let's say it hurt James. That would have felt a lot. That's actually really soft right? James is going to sign all of these  and they're on hacksmith.store. A very limited number so check it out. Hacksmith.store signed balls. Got a gift here for James. The guys at VELO thought you deserve this. It's normally reserved for people who  can throw 90 but you know, same club. That was incredibly difficult to  hit but we've already established   I'm not a professional athlete. Xbox Game Pass sponsored this  video so I could be an MLB star. So check out MLB The Show 21. There's a link in the description below and  get your signed balls at hacksmith.store.

Channel: Hacksmith Industries

Views: 1,622,632

Keywords: thehacksmith, hacksmith, baseball, mlb the show, gamepass, mlb, pitching, machine, baseball cannon, super speed, major league baseball, engineering, technology, science, stem, workshop, build, create, metal, electricity, power, inventor, battery, experiment, electronics, powerful, imalent, soldering, wires, wired, sports, curveball, knuckleball, baseball field, 3D printing, slider, fast ball, fastest pitch, catcher, pitcher, ball, base, glove, cannon, homerun, stikeout, strike, coach, mph, miles per hour, speed, field, diamond

Id: f1JJA4qWSzQ

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021