You might remember YouTuber and engineer extraordinaire Nick O’Hara’s Guitar Hero-playing robot. Well, for his latest trick, he has created a golf bag that lets you select the club you want with the remote control, then throws it to you.

Robot caddy

The bag also acts like a real human caddy. When the microphone picks up your voice, it listens to you telling it how far you need to hit and recommends the best club for the job. Better still, it’s clever enough to take other factors into account, so you can tell it that it’s very windy on the course, or that you need to play uphill, and it will adjust its club selection.

How does it work?

All of the clubs live in individual tubes inside a rotating gold bag. When a club is selected, the bag rotates until the tube it is sitting in aligns with an air cylinder. Then, air from a compressor hiding in a golf push cart shoots the club out of the cylinder.

The push cart also houses the Raspberry Pi running Nick’s software, as well as the batteries.

A big motor and gearbox power the rotation, and a switch that clicks every time a club rotates past it keeps track of which club is in line with the air cylinder.

Custom 3D-printed parts fit on the top of each club’s handle and let it slot into the bottom of its tube. This stops all the clubs’ heads from knocking against one another when they’re sat in the bag.

Famous fan

Nick flew his invention all the way to England so that fancy professional golfer Rick Shiels could try it out. Of course, our infamous weather foiled their plan to visit a proper golf course, so they made do on a driving range. Our bad.

Nick, you make cool stuff, so I’m glad that snapped club didn’t hit you in the head at the end of the video.

There are loads more cool builds on Nick’s YouTube channel. We particularly liked the world’s largest cap gun and the experiment to see whether donating money could beat phone addiction.