Best TT Robot

 

Best ball delivery - Butterfly Amicus 3000+.  Natural flight to the ball, especially on loops.

 

Rich215 could help with a more rounded comparison than me.  I know he rates the Newstar highly.

 

Wow - strong words.  And an expensive item to put in the garbage.  Maybe I should wait outside and see what else you will throw away?  :-)

 

Anyway, are we talking about the same Amicus?  The 3000+?  And what did you think was bad about it?

 

I got mine from Far East Sports:

 

 

Out of stock now, unfortunately.

 

Happily - the H2W Pro is just a rebadged 989H, so who cares!

 

Great robot.  Ball delivery has a low arc though, and it can be tricky to get short, high-spin backspin balls.  These two reasons led me to swap mine for the Amicus.  My club now has the 989H.

Thanks

 

Yup - a lot of companies have rebadged the Y&T 989 range over the years.  They just slap their own branding on.

 

I've had both at the same time, and decided to keep the Amicus, and sold the 989H to my club.  So I still get to use both I suppose.

 

The Y&T has incredible programming and flexibility.  The touch screen is just amazing.  It could be slightly better at storing custom drills, but that's nit picking.  Also, it has a fully motorised, two wheel head.  So you can do top, bottom, side spin, all at different positions, and different speeds, in the same drill.  The net is fast to put up and down, and the whole unit is simple to move around (if that matters to you).  Downsides - low ball "arc" means most deliveries are tight, skiddy ones.  You can't program a slow, high-spin, high arc loop, for example.  Also, it's very difficult to program a high spin short delivery.  To get around these two limitations, you can raise the wheels of the base unit up, which tilts the head at an angle.  But that means you're faffing around a lot, trying to find a good angle.  It's a real shame, because it's an incredible machine otherwise.  You can definitely live with this, but still worth mentioning.

 

The Amicus 3000+ has a massive control panel with a lot of physical buttons, knobs, and slidey things.  It has some additional features (like a random function, auto-pause after backspin deliveries, etc), but the programming is more limited than the Y&T (due to the limitations of having a physical interface, rather than the GUI of the 989H's touchscreen).  The net is bigger, and works slightly better when recycling balls, but is trickier to put up and down each time you set it up.  You can only have top and/or backspin in the same programming sequence (the 989H can have sidespin too, due to the motorised head).  You can rotate the head manually for sidespin, but then you can only have left and/or right sidespin in a sequence, with no top/backspin.  The ball delivery is better (IMO) than the 989H, which sold it to me.  The head has a deflector panel in, which means you can vary spin more independently of position.  This makes it easy to have short backspin balls, and high-arc loop balls.  This is a very different approach to the 989H's "two wheel and out" way of working.  But (as jeannn has mentioned), this results in two things.  First up, you have a bit of sidespin on most balls.  This effect seems to reduce with some robot use - I think the deflector head wears in a bit after a few months.  Secondly, the ball placement isn't 100% accurate.  The 989H is really accurate - the balls land in a 5cm square patch around your programmed target location.  The Amicus just isn't that accurate.  For me, the Amicus' variability is actually a good thing.  You have to watch the ball and adjust your shot more than the 989H, which is too robotic (no pun intended) for me.  This is a very personal thing, obviously.  It can be annoying to program a long topspin ball on the Amicus and have every 5th ball overshoot the table.

 

They're both great, and you'd be happy with either.  If Butterfly brought out an Amicus with a touchscreen panel, I'd buy it immediately.  Until then, it comes down to personal preference.  IMO it's a choice between better programming, or more natural (and variable) ball delivery.

 

ps - I've tried the Palio 40mm polyball in both, and both seem fine with the slight increase in size.

I thought I saw a TT robot with 3 throw wheels 120 degrees apart.  That would be a good start.  Next the throw wheels should be able to go forwards AND reverse so slow spinny top spins and back spins are possible and one can change the spin on-the-fly from top spin, back spin and side spin.

The throw head should not only be able to angle side to side but move side to side so balls can be thrown from either corner.  The robot should be able to detect when the previous balls has been returned so it can throw the next ball in a realistic way.  I don't like it when my Newgy throws a ball before the one I hit has landed in its net.  I know I can adjust the intervals between balls but it is would be much more realistic if there were some smarts to automatically throw a ball after my return has gone into the net.

Yes, it would cost a bit but it would make a good demo at a trade show.

any '989' model is basically the same robot - just re-packaged using different brand labels?

 

Yanle has some good models
http://tt-robot.com/yanle-368-table-tennis-robot-p-195.html