Lottery / Bingo ball holder

thingiverse

While working as one of the people in charge of a local lottery draw I noticed that we would have to take the time to arrange all the balls in order to show they were all present for viewers of a live stream. After spending a few minutes arranging them, we would have to grab all 32 balls and manually pick them up and put them into the drum. This design allows all the balls to be loaded into a sloped channel where the numbers can all be displayed, with a sliding pin at the end to allow one row of balls to be released at a time, either into some kind of channel that routes the balls into a drum or in my case held above the hole and loaded that way. This piece is designed to hold 32x 20mm radius ping pong balls, but any 20mm radius ball should fit. The parts were too large to print in one piece on my Ender 3 so they were split into 2 pieces with dovetail joints to connect them after printing. After making mine I found that some parts are too tight, some joints too loose. You may need to Sand / Glue as appropriate. I would have revised the design if it was more important, but all I needed was a single working model The slider pin may need to be scaled down in 2 dimensions to make it skinny enough to fit through all the square holes. Your mileage may vary. You will need to print the following parts multiple times: 2x Upper Rails Edge male 2x Upper Rails Edge female 3x Upper Mid Rails Male 3x Upper Mid Rails Female 4x Bottom rail female 4x Bottom rail male