HAW Hamburg Table Tennis Balancing Team

Founded in the spring of 2025, the HAW Hamburg Table Tennis Balancing Team is a multidisciplinary group of four mechatronics students. Our mission is to demystify control engineering by developing an interactive demonstration platform that dynamically balances a ping-pong ball on a tiltable paddle. By combining computer vision, real-time control strategies, and custom hardware, we make abstract control concepts tangible and inspire the next generation of engineers.

One of our core deliverables is a modular, exchangeable battery and control electronics system built around three custom-designed PCBs:

1) Exchangeable Battery Pack Interface PCBs (×2)

We have designed two ultra-compact two-layer daughterboards that form an interchangeable battery pack system. One board brings power from an XT60 connector on the battery housing, while the mating board routes that connection via pogo-pin receptacle pads to the mainboard. This design allows rapid hot-swap of battery modules without exposed wiring or bulky plugs, ensuring minimal downtime during demonstrations and safeguarding against connector wear.

2) Main Control HAT PCB (×1)

Our flagship board is a custom Four-Layer Raspberry Pi HAT serving as the “brain” of the balancing device. It integrates:

• A servo interface for two high-torque, vibration-rated servomotors controlling the paddle’s pitch and roll axes.
• A high current voltage regulator stepping down the pack voltage to stable 5 V for the Pi and peripherals.
• A custom LED charge-indicator circuit, designed and simulated in LTSPICE, to provide real-time visual feedback of battery status.

In addition to our electronics, the mechanical structure of the demonstrator relies on precision-fabricated parts:

1) Sheet-metal parts for the camera mounting palte and electronics mounting plate, providing rigid fixing of the components.

2) CNC-machined aluminum components for the tilting gimbal, handle interface and platform interface, ensuring smooth, long lasting motion under load.

3) 3D-printed parts for the battery pack housing shells.

By partnering with PCBWay, we aim to turn these PCB prototypes into production-quality modules. Rapid turnaround of PCB prototypes will allow us to iterate our board layouts—optimizing trace impedance for servo currents, validating our voltage regulator’s thermal profile, and fine-tuning the pogo-pin footprint for mechanical robustness. Your support would also let more team members gain hands-on experience with PCB design and assembly, advancing our collective skills in embedded hardware development.

Looking ahead, our balancing platform will be showcased at the HAW Hamburg Girls’ Day outreach event, and will form the testbed for advanced control strategies in our semester-long simulation study in MATLAB/SIMULINK. With PCBWay’s sponsorship, we can ensure our hardware is as polished and reliable as our control algorithms, inspiring both our university cohort and visitors to explore the world of mechatronics.

We appreciate your consideration and would be thrilled to collaborate with PCBWay to bring our innovative balancing demonstrator from prototype to polished reality.

• Demonstrator