Colin Furze's Semi-Automatic Potato Cannon

Advisable or not, people have been building potato cannons to propel vegetables at incredible speed for many years. Most, however, as simple mechanisms that require the user to stuff a potato into the muzzle, fill the combustion chamber with a flammable gas of some kind, then ignite it with a spark generator from a grill. It’s a very manual, and very “don’t try this at home operation,” with a slow rate of fire.

Colin Furze, after building a driveable screw tank, decided that this type of launcher was just was he needed to provide it with some offensive capabilities. The first iteration, shown in the video below, is loaded in a "traditional" manual muzzle loading manner. With its gas tank strapped to the side, he claimed that it was "the most over-engineered potato launcher the Internet has ever seen.”

This statement was soon surpassed, though, as he split the assembly in two, enabling it to automatically separate via two linear actuators. When a potato, apple, or sugar beet is in place, the cannon closes, stripping off the outside of the fruit/vegetable and forming a seal.

An Arduino is used for control of the operation, so that one button starts the open/shut procedure, and more importantly times the amount of gas that is allowed into the ignition chamber. It then fires with an impressive amount of force, at one point pushing an entire chunk out of the mattress that he used to absorb the impact.