Help me choose a robot.

Romanoff · Jul 10, 2022

I can't choose a robot. I want the robot to be able to send balls with slow speed and strong rotation. I think it needs a roller motor reverse. For example, for topspin with strong spin, the bottom motor should spin backwards and the top motor should spin forward. For a ball with strong bottom spin, on the contrary, the bottom motor should spin forward and the top motor should spin backward. And if I want to alternate such balls in a series, then the motors must have time to rotate in one direction or the other. I watched a lot of videos about table tennis robots on youtube, but I did not find a robot with one throwing head with such parameters. Are there such robots? Or do I need to consider robots with two throwing heads? One head sends the balls with downspin and the other with upspin.
I am using google translator.

Brs · Jul 10, 2022

Don't buy a robot.

Romanoff · Jul 10, 2022

I live in a small town and sometimes I have no one to play with. I can come to the hall and practice the serve. But I get bored of it quickly. If I buy a robot, I will play with it.

Tony's Table Tennis · Jul 10, 2022

Robot spin to me is not realistic.
To me, robot is only as good as a footwork drill machine and to keep fit (very handy during lockdown period)

Too much spin on the robot, the ball then either shots long/short and difficult to be perfect. I even moved the ball away from the table, to give it more time to arc, but its just not the same.
Dual head robots are also very expensive. So all depending on your budget - most higher end robots can fit your description.

If you looking at any robot to overcome your boredom, then many robots will do.
Just make sure there is one with a catch net/ball recycle system, and one where you can program drills.

tabletennisdaily1 · Jul 10, 2022

Robot spin to me is not realistic.

I agree that robot is not same a good practice partner, but I think it is actually decent enough replication of a multi-ball coach. I personally believe you can still improve on a robot, experiment with your technique, and greatly improve your fitness and footwork (very valueable). I have one and it has certainly helped me improve much faster because the club I play at is only open on the weekends, so I drill during the week. They can be expensive though, so make sure you get lots of use out of it!

Chinese options:
Omni ($370): https://www.taobao.com/list/item/666608083591.htm?spm=a21wu.12321156.recommend-tpp.2
Omni-Pro ($670): https://www.taobao.com/list/item/673185166261.htm
Both programmable center mount catch net robots with moving head. Thanks to DukeGaGa in this thread for mentioning these options: https://www.tabletennisdaily.com/forum/showthread.php?27543-Help-me-choose-PowerPong-or-TenniRobo

Non-chinese:
TenniRobo (~$800): https://tennirobo.com/
Excellent triple motor system with two axis servo head control. Its most unique selling point is that it is free standing, so it is compact and easy to travel with, and you can mount it at different positions: left, right, center, close to the net like multi-ball coach, far away to simulate counter topspin. Good app to program drills. Good price for the hardware you get. However, currently not available due to the war (made by Ukrainian guy).
PowerPong Omega (~$2000): https://www.powerpong.org/products/power-pong-omega-table-tennis-robot
Very expensive center table mount robot with catch net. Non moving head; it uses a deflection plate to guide the ball left or right. Triple motor system with android app to program drills. Made in Hungary. Same as Butterfly Amicus, but slightly cheaper and better app apparently. Good enough for Timo Boll to drill with occasionally (he said during a vlog video).

latej · Jul 10, 2022

Romanoff said:
I can't choose a robot. I want the robot to be able to send balls with slow speed and strong rotation. I think it needs a roller motor reverse. For example, for topspin with strong spin, the bottom motor should spin backwards and the top motor should spin forward. For a ball with strong bottom spin, on the contrary, the bottom motor should spin forward and the top motor should spin backward. And if I want to alternate such balls in a series, then the motors must have time to rotate in one direction or the other. I watched a lot of videos about table tennis robots on youtube, but I did not find a robot with one throwing head with such parameters. Are there such robots? Or do I need to consider robots with two throwing heads? One head sends the balls with downspin and the other with upspin.
I am using google translator.

The Butterfly Amicus Prime can do what you want, and the Amicus Expert can't. Indeed the back-spin produced by Amicus Expert is less than some players around me can produce. In some situations I'd wish for the stronger backspin, for example the short serve to train BH flick - players make stronger back-spin. If I knew beforehand, I'd buy Amicus Prime. Still Amicus Expert is good enough, as other people mentioned, the footwork here is more important, it's possible to setup good exercises.

I don't recommend Donic Robopong, no experience with Joola, but I don't recommend either. It needs to be reasonably sofisticated. It's possible the Power Pong Omega can do what Amicus can, but that you have to research/check yourself.

lodro · Jul 10, 2022

Romanoff said:
I live in a small town and sometimes I have no one to play with. I can come to the hall and practice the serve. But I get bored of it quickly. If I buy a robot, I will play with it.

I sell you my tennirobo with catchnet and 200 balls.

Romanoff · Jul 11, 2022

Thanks everyone for the replies.
The Chinese variants of Omni and Omni-Pro are noteworthy. But there is little information and reviews of the owners about them. Maybe they have low power motors? No motor reversal? I don’t know how to buy on Taobao, usually I buy goods from China on Aliexpress.
With the Butterfly Amicus Prime and Power Pong Omega robots, it's not clear how quickly the motors can change direction of rotation to the opposite. 1 second or more? Manufacturers do not specify this parameter. If 2 seconds is a lot, it's slower than the pace of a real game.
Tennirobo is a good robot, but it doesn't have a closed loop. I read the OOAK forum thread, where Sergey wrote about different versions of his robot. One of the versions was with balls from below. A pipe with a diameter of 50 mm was attached to the bucket, the pipe was higher than the bucket, and a head with three motors was fixed on the upper part of the pipe. Sergei abandoned this design, I think in vain. It was possible to produce two versions of Tennirobo. One is more compact, and the other with a closed ball supply cycle.
I am using google translator.

jk1980 · Jul 11, 2022

Romanoff said:
Thanks everyone for the replies.
The Chinese variants of Omni and Omni-Pro are noteworthy. But there is little information and reviews of the owners about them. Maybe they have low power motors? No motor reversal? I don’t know how to buy on Taobao, usually I buy goods from China on Aliexpress.
With the Butterfly Amicus Prime and Power Pong Omega robots, it's not clear how quickly the motors can change direction of rotation to the opposite. 1 second or more? Manufacturers do not specify this parameter. If 2 seconds is a lot, it's slower than the pace of a real game.

I own the Butterfly Amicus Expert robot and i can assure you that it will be plenty fast enough for you.

You can change the speed up to 120 balls per minute, which makes it 2 balls per second. You will not be able to return those anyways and yes, you can program it to throw the first ball short with backspin, next long to your backhand with topspin, next ball middle with right side spin etc.

Check out the control panel of the amicus expert:
https://i.imgur.com/iB6Xge5.png
You can setup up to 7 different balls that will be played in that order with all of them having different values for:
-trajectory
-placement
-sidespin
-speed
-top/backspin

you can even have the robot shoot the programmed balls in a random order.

It comes with about 20 preprogrammed drills as well that were designed by Timo Bolls former coach.

I can really recommend this robot.

latej · Jul 11, 2022

Romanoff said:
With the Butterfly Amicus Prime and Power Pong Omega robots, it's not clear how quickly the motors can change direction of rotation to the opposite. 1 second or more? Manufacturers do not specify this parameter. If 2 seconds is a lot, it's slower than the pace of a real game.

On Amicus Expert I tried 90 balls/minute in exercise with 3 balls, 1. backspin serve 2. long back-spin 3. FH block/drive. Between 2 and 3 there is change from backspin to topspin, it worked fine. But let me say that 90 balls/minute in an exercise which involves backspin is not realistic, especially, if you continue the repetition. This exercise is plenty fast in 65 balls/minute. In top-spin only exercises, yes, 65 is not enough, e.g. I use 70 for warmup, and drills like left/right, Falkenberg, etc., and usually at the end I do 90+ random drill to kill myself (in short 20 secs only sprints). That is OK with top-spin only but in exercises involving change of spin I never ever dreamed to be that fast

Good luck in picking!

lodro · Jul 11, 2022

latej said:
On Amicus Expert I tried 90 balls/minute in exercise with 3 balls, 1. backspin serve 2. long back-spin 3. FH block/drive. Between 2 and 3 there is change from backspin to topspin, it worked fine. But let me say that 90 balls/minute in an exercise which involves backspin is not realistic, especially, if you continue the repetition. This exercise is plenty fast in 65 balls/minute. In top-spin only exercises, yes, 65 is not enough, e.g. I use 70 for warmup, and drills like left/right, Falkenberg, etc., and usually at the end I do 90+ random drill to kill myself (in short 20 secs only sprints). That is OK with top-spin only but in exercises involving change of spin I never ever dreamed to be that fast Good luck in picking!

When you do topspin only, at 70 balls per minute can you please tell me what rpm and what speed (km/h) do you use ?

latej · Jul 11, 2022

lodro said:
When you do topspin only, at 70 balls per minute can you please tell me what rpm and what speed (km/h) do you use ?

The robot has

- Speed setting: Less 1 3 5 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 More
You can also choose e.g. 18, in such case there is light on both 17 and 19

- Spin setting: Back -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Top

- also Trajectory, Placement and SideSpin settings in the similar spirit

So in that particular exercise for FH warmup I have 2 balls

- Ball 1, Speed 17, Spin 2 (Tr cca -0.5, Pl 3.5, SideSpin 0)
- Ball 2, Speed 18, Spin 2 (Tr cca -0.5, Pl 3.5, SideSpin 0)

But I don't know how to translate the "units"

, currently.

However, for top-spin balls I often use those values, I mean for Speed 17-19 and Spin 2. In order to speed up or slow down I mostly change the setting for balls per minute, not the speed of the individual balls.

Also, there is one handy setting called Scatter - it is ON/OFF setting. If ON, the robot will not make the ball exactly, but with a little bit of deviation, you know, to approximate a player who tries to play to FH side, but the ball is each time a bit different. This make the exercises more realistic. In some exercises you won't recognize the difference that much, if you balls already differ. But in this FH warmup exercise, you really can recognize clearly, it forces you to move, or be ready to move.

lodro · Jul 11, 2022

latej said:
The robot has

- Speed setting: Less 1 3 5 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 More
You can also choose e.g. 18, in such case there is light on both 17 and 19

- Spin setting: Back -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Top

- also Trajectory, Placement and SideSpin settings in the similar spirit

So in that particular exercise for FH warmup I have 2 balls

- Ball 1, Speed 17, Spin 2 (Tr cca -0.5, Pl 3.5, SideSpin 0)
- Ball 2, Speed 18, Spin 2 (Tr cca -0.5, Pl 3.5, SideSpin 0)

But I don't know how to translate the "units" , currently.

However, for top-spin balls I often use those values, I mean for Speed 17-19 and Spin 2. In order to speed up or slow down I mostly change the setting for balls per minute, not the speed of the individual balls.

Also, there is one handy setting called Scatter - it is ON/OFF setting. If ON, the robot will not make the ball exactly, but with a little bit of deviation, you know, to approximate a player who tries to play to FH side, but the ball is each time a bit different. This make the exercises more realistic. In some exercises you won't recognize the difference that much, if you balls already differ. But in this FH warmup exercise, you really can recognize clearly, it forces you to move, or be ready to move.

Thank you.
I see you are definitely working close to the top speeds.
Pity we can not have common denominators to be able to compare the speeds and spins.

I assume it is not in the interest of the individual manufacturers to give "their secrets" away 😁

Don't get me wrong , I know that I am not competing here, I was just curious.

I also work with a cycle of 20 shots and 8 second breaks.
I just checked, and my comfortable FH topspin shots are 3850rpm /36km/h.

When doing it at 45 shots /minute i can go the whole day or until my arm falls off 😁

I remember reading some warning once when a tennirobo owner gave a heads-up saying that when going over a certain speed the balls would make permanent marks in the table top.

latej · Jul 11, 2022

lodro said:
Thank you.
I see you are definitely working close to the top speeds.

I don't know, it doesn't quite feel so. For the top-spin drills, when I am at speed 17-19, there is still room upwards to 21. And regarding spin from the robot, even more so. But I am not interested that much in getting big top-spins from the robot. Thinking about it, I could imagine trying an exercise to loop-kill someone's slow-spinny top-spin. I'm sure you've seen this.. And regarding balls per minute, doing Falkenberg or 2FH-left+2FH-right at 70 is enough fast for me and I know how 90 looks like, so you know you're not near the top-speed.

Pity we can not have common denominators to be able to compare the speeds and spins.

Indeed, it's a pity I can't translate those.

I remember reading some warning once when a tennirobo owner gave a heads-up saying that when going over a certain speed the balls would make permanent marks in the table top.

And yes, there are those marks. This is due to, I'd say, my laziness, because I don't permanently change the exercises. There is like 10-20 exercises I tend to repeat. Table marks prove it

Robot is good as an additional training way/means.

P.S. It is such a pleasure to see that you properly quote the replies now

)

lodro · Jul 12, 2022

https://youtu.be/9whZOxwBZJM

talking about speed reminded me of this old Timo Boll Butterfly prom video.
Who can hit harder ?
I do use Innerforce ZLC blades but not with flextra rubbers so i think I am faster than 44km/h 😁

Tony's Table Tennis · Jul 12, 2022

I think I must time myself to see how much balls I feed per minute, so I can be part of your conversation

Romanoff · Jul 12, 2022

The robot that I like Robo-pong 4050 XL. He can change strong rotations at a good pace. But it's not for sale. The man upgraded his Newgy Robopong. Video on YouTube "Robopong 4050 XL".

7sagittarius7 · Jul 12, 2022

A little over three years ago I bought the Butterfly Amicus Prime and I use it regularly, I can say that I am very satisfied with it.
Romanoff, everything you wrote that you wanted, this one can do.

Here you have two of my videos with that robot. Here is the first training and testing the possibilities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9z6sgdFR_k), and in the second one is my complete training with the robot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2GbhVn6xXE).

Romanoff · Jul 12, 2022

You understood me wrong. In your first video, you have some balls flying with strong topspin, and then some balls with strong bottomspin. But I am interested in the alternation of such balls. One ball with strong topspin, the next ball with strong bottomspin. I have never seen such a video with Butterfly Amicus or Power pong. Maybe the motors have a lot of inertia and they do not have time to pick up speed in a short time (about 1 second).

tabletennisdaily1 · Jul 12, 2022

Romanoff said:
You understood me wrong. In your first video, you have some balls flying with strong topspin, and then some balls with strong bottomspin. But I am interested in the alternation of such balls. One ball with strong topspin, the next ball with strong bottomspin. I have never seen such a video with Butterfly Amicus or Power pong. Maybe the motors have a lot of inertia and they do not have time to pick up speed in a short time (about 1 second).

Romanoff, the Amicus Prime/Power Pong can do consecutive topspin/backspin balls. Here are some examples:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jhgq6p1K1s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4asNnEFf8
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTRw1Cs2idA
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKtooZbQKUI

Help me choose a robot.

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