Arduino for pool

[jrctherake]

Rich,

I might have beaten you to this. I've been working on this exact problem for the past few years, and it is a super tough problem to solve once you get down to the details like moment of inertia restoration, the power consumption of MEMS gyroscopes, a way to charge an embedded battery reliably, low cost, potting (epoxy is the way to go because phenloic resin is poured at 120degC, says the president of Cyclops when I asked him), shock survivability (Dr. Dave calculated for me impact to be around 10,000 Gs of acceleration), and a myriad of other things. I filed a provisional patent for some of my ideas already.

But this problem is so hard anyway, I just want to see someone make a product that is useful and worth the money. Please continue with this effort anyway! I want to have a prototype ready for the SBE if I can get some more things working properly.

Nate

I think that removing the ball from the bed cloth would make the cushion impact measurements nearly worthless. Further, since the impact on the cushion is not at the equator of the ball, the ball will yank on the pendulum and start oscillating vertically.

I think you need to review the measurements that people have already made before you plan to make your own. In particular, ask yourself what have they failed to measure that your approach would allow.

I agree, ball leaving cloth renders it USELESS.

As someone with a programming and math background, I can see this being very lucrative when finished "if" the finished product is an actual cue ball that can be played with while tracked and shown as graphics on laptop, smartphone etc....

But, like I said earlier, it will take MUCH more than just math background and lots and lots of time and most likely a good deal of money.

I'm sure Nate is fully aware of everything I'm talking about otherwise he would have a finished product on shelves as we speak.

 

[noMoreSchon]

Hell, sounds hard as hell, but why stop at the cue ball?

You can do it to all the balls, then upload the results to see

how the pros do it, or which shot you need the most help on.

Record your practice/games to evaluate. Real shots, you think

you put left on the ball, nope, right spin was registered...Now I

am interested in it.

 

[Bob Jewett]

You could start with glueing a chip on top of an air hockey puck. That already seems hard enough to see if this idea can be made to work at all. And you could use a fairly large transmitter.

 

[nataddrho]

You could start with glueing a chip on top of an air hockey puck. That already seems hard enough to see if this idea can be made to work at all. And you could use a fairly large transmitter.

You can use an IIR filter to characterize the collisions. You would be trying to measure the impulse width. The problem is that for very low elastic collisions the acceleration is very short with a very large magnitude, which is out of range of most accelerometers. However, you can at least detect the time between shots, and you can identify between a bumper rebound and a hard rebound (data will clip). This can be used to determine whether the CB hit an OB or a cushion first.

Rich, start with building a simple tilt sensor. Make it tell you at what angle your board is tilted from vertical. I can help you with this, and you'll learn a lot from it.