I Battled Mike The Situation: Cornhole Contest

I competed against Mike the Situation from the Jersey Shore with this machine I built that plays cornhole! Going head to head to see if Mike or the machine is better at one of the best fall time football tailgating activities. Also, I truly never thought I’d be saying that sentence in my science media career as it’s just so random that it’s awesome… and here’s how we got here. I was asked to participate in Scotts Lawnstream Fest. Scotts has this thing called Lawnstream. They’ve been livestreaming a backyard 24/7 since June. And did I mention Scotts is an Ohio based company… neighboring my hometown!! The original ask for the event was something like, could you build a mechanical device that could play cornhole and then my business partner Michael sent me an image of this crazy contraption. The first thing I thought of was yea, we could probably do that, but then I started thinking about how far we could actually take it… could we in fact build a corn hole machine, so dynamic, so robust that it would be more effective than a human!?

In my initial research I saw this video that the @Hacksmith put out with a robotic arm throwing a bean bag and it was literally perfect, however we had 7 days to build something and send it to New Jersey where the livestream was happening. I factored in shipping days going from LA to New Jersey and had to pivot to something with a more simple design. I then came up with what I am calling the Cornholio 3000… throwback to all my millennials out there. The design would entail a catapult for very accurate bean bag launching, as well as an air cannon capable of sending a bag perfectly onto the cornhole board. The left side of the machine would also feature a defensive tool… an airhorn. We originally had a potato launcher on there too (lols) but after recalling how powerful those are, we decided to go without it as I was trying to simply win a cornhole game and not destroy the board. The first step in this equation was figuring out how to build a catapult, and that led us to the video from “I like to build stuff” who was coincidentally also on the scotts lawn stream event before us! .We followed Bob’s build pretty closely except we had to make some fabrications for cornhole. This included using a smaller handle to cup just the bag as well as using a gate hinge instead of drilling a hole through our movable arm. We also used 1⁄2 inch rubber hosing double laced to give us the power we needed. After the first day of building we had a functional catapult...but the cup wasn’t the right angle. We then disassembled the handle and bolted it directly to the moving arm and gave it a forward facing angle. This changed everything! Next, we then added two arms to the catapult and created a quick release plate for our air cannon. We then attached it to a movable tripod head, which is almost exactly what we did for our potato cannon build. With a bit of tuning we got the cannon pretty dialed in (shows the hole in one) The next day of building was dedicated to the defensive items, this included a little xylophone, marine air horn and eventually a cow bell….because you always need more cowbell of course!! Our very last step was to include wheels so I could move this machine into place for the best positioning…and our final touch was adding some paint and decals to turn this contraption from borning wood to something more fierce looking.

The next step for us was to fly out to New Jersey and take on The Situation one on one! To set the rules we were going to play 5 games with the first person getting to 21 taking that game. The warm up was just solo to get a good idea of what type of situation I’d be in… turns out it was not a good one! Mike is actually really good at this! Game 2 I busted out the machine. I learned that the PSI gauge on the aircanon is wildly inaccurate …I then turned to using defensive measures. Then back to offense and actually scored some points with the catapult, which was very accurate but super hard to get the right amount of power. Coming up on the third game and about an hour in, I knew I was toast…desperately trying to score I found myself in a losing situation.

Big shoutout to Scotts for having me on the Scotts Lawnstream Fest!
#lawnstreamfest #lawnstream #scottslawn