DigiBall Passaround Reviews

[Bavafongoul]

I now have more information. The selling price of the DigiBall will be around $300.

Please provide your thoughts. Thanks.

I’m spending more than that to get a KW shaft made. I knew DigiBall was going to be a radical innovation for pool instruction and would be a huge hit. So just drop me a line where to send my money and the earliest availability date. Psst…….send me a PM…….we can do it on the down low….…I won’t tell anyone ………or just add my name to the early sign up list.

 

[Bavafongoul]

Any plans to have this with measles?

There could be trademark infringement…….maybe that’s why Arcos II cue balls are different from Aramith Measle CB

 

[Mensabum]

Could the previous testers kindly give me an estimate of how many hours they have been able to play on a single charge? Roughly. Thanks!

Let me see.... We used it every day except the first day it came and only charged it once. That wasn't bcuz it was dead, but bcuz we had used it for at least 10 - 12 hours total the two days prior and I put it on the charging plate just to be sure it didn't die later on that day or the next. Sorry I can't be more precise, but your 16 hour estimate seems right on the money. At least for the time I had it anyway.

 

[Mensabum]

The ball is really a read-only beacon, not a point to point connection. The phone/mobile device just scans for all BLE devices and then filters on the selected MAC address of your ball. Very easy to use. No pairing or classical Bluetooth required. This also allows for multiple observers… technically you can watch the ball of a match as an audience member with your app, as long as you are getting a good signal.

There are parameters you can change on the ball, but to access it you need to preform a gesture with the ball that is un-natural to accidentally activate during play. That uses a handshake connection to update a few bytes that are written to Flash inside of the ball. The parameters mostly have to do with extra time series data that is only interesting to curious users.

The DigiCue integration WAS in the app, but I rewrote it from scratch recently and didn’t add it back in yet. I probably won’t add it back until after launch, because there is so much other work associated with getting the ball to market.

I also want customer feedback on what they expect, on average and as a collective group, of the type of data is interesting to them. I can guess and add a lot of features, but that is never the correct approach. It’s better to only showcase main features and add more later, than overwhelm users with a starship control panel.

Imo, the Digiball already has enuf features to overwhelm most users.
Once you have it set for your equipment, you need only watch the display.
Like you said, once players put some miles on these, they'll know if there's anything else they want or desire and you could just write an update or patch for it. Yes??

 

[kling&allen]

Could the previous testers kindly give me an estimate of how many hours they have been able to play on a single charge? Roughly. Thanks!

I put it back in its stand at night out of habit so never used it more than 4 hours without charging.

 

[boogieman]

Could the previous testers kindly give me an estimate of how many hours they have been able to play on a single charge? Roughly. Thanks!

I honestly can't remember. I think I recharged it once during the week. It wasn't dead but I charged it before showing it to some buddies.

 

[jnwilliams]

I want to be on the wait list!

 

[fastone371]

i think I played for about 5 hours and then it died on me. After recharging it I used it a couple more nights and didnt have to recharge, probably another 8 hours of playing time.

 

[mikeiniowa]

Sorry this is so late.

I was as pretty excited to get the DigiBall so quickly—it showed up faster than I expected.
The first thing I did was weigh it. It came in at 167 grams, which is right in line with a brand-new Aramith Black Measles ball that weighs 168 grams. So, off to a good start.


When I brought it to the private club where I play, I wanted to see how straight it rolled. I ran several up-and-down-the-table drills along the center line—partly to check the ball's consistency and partly to test my own stroke. The DigiBall performed even better than I had hoped. My stroke, on the other hand, still needs some attention.


I installed the app on my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and it ran smoothly without a single hiccup. I also gave it a shot on my older Galaxy S7 tablet. It worked, but it did freeze up a few times, which could be due to the tablet’s age or specs.


The Cast device for the TV was a great feature to have. I did run into some trouble connecting to it a couple of times, but unplugging and restarting it usually did the trick. Once it was connected, it worked flawlessly. I liked it enough that I bought the Cast device separately so I could also use it with my DigiCue.


Originally, I planned to record myself doing the complete Bert Kinister 60-minute workout using the DigiBall. Unfortunately, I got sick that week and didn’t get a chance to film the whole thing—only managed to capture a few shots, which I’ve included here.

At Anytime Billiards we have the projection pro billiards system. You can see in the video the shots I was shooting. I didn't have the projector or the phone in the best spot to record the video. The projection is pretty washed out.


I found the cue tip placement diagram to be spot-on and really helpful. There were quite a few shots in the kinister workout that required me to hit 55% from center and seeing and having the info was beneficial.
The speed meter, though, seemed a bit off—maybe the algorithm needs more data points to fine-tune its accuracy. For the record, I didn’t use the ball for breaking or jumping, so I can’t speak to its performance in those areas.


All in all, I honestly don’t have anything bad to say about it. It’s a great product, and I’ll definitely be buying one when it officially hits the market.

 

[mikeiniowa]

Only once did the charge not last what I expected. Must of been user error that night.
I'm not sure of the exact time between charges but certainly 8 to 12 hours of play most times between charges.

 

[Mensabum]

Okay, apologies to anyone who was waiting for me to start this, had intentions of getting it done middle of last week and then work and illness got the better of me.

Please post all passaround reviews in this thread, thanks!



Before sending the DigiBall out to the first passaround participant I was able to take it out to my local pool hall and give it a quick demo myself and wanted to share my initial thoughts.

First, the overall quality of the DigiBall and associated accessories is great! It's a real Aramith cue ball which just helps instill confidence that it's going to play and perform correctly. The charging base is slick and works great. App was super easy to find in the app store, get downloaded, and getting it connected to the DigiBall and up and running was basically automatic. Really fantastic job from a usability perspective, it felt intuitive to use the whole time.

Now, onto what the DigiBall actually does.....and what it does is really very cool! I was involved in trying out the DigiCue too and that was a cool device for sure, but many players have unique little movements in their stroke I've never wanted to limit my natural stroke too much by trying to get it to conform into a specific type of thing. I've always been naturally much more interested with the result of the stroke. And that is what DigiBall delivers!

This is the first time ever I've been able to actually get feedback about where I'm contacting the cue ball and to be able to compare that to my intent was immediately helpful. I quickly learned I did not always strike the cue ball where I thought it was. Often I was closer to center than I would have guessed and sometimes I was putting in a little bottom when I wasn't explicitly intending to. I spent some time just working on my stroke and tip position and using the DigiBall for feedback and guidance of how to adjust. I found that really help.

Then I wanted to use the DigiBall to analyze how spin was effecting my getting shape for certain shots. I setup a couple drills with repeatable ball positions where I was having to 3-4 rails to get shape for my net shot and setup some blockers to make it, for me, a rather difficult positional shot. Then I started shooting it and comparing my results with how I hit it and that too was incredibly informative. The best positions were acheived in a way that wasn't exactly intuitive to me but by making small adjustments and seeing how well I hit my intended spot on the DigiBall I was able to dial in on the best way to hit the shot and really learned quite a bit from this.

It's super interesting to see how side vs top vs follow effects a shot that involves 3-4 rails for shape. I only had one short afternoon session with the DigiBall but it was enough to know that this is going to be a super useful training tool and one I'm excited to spend some more time with. I really think this will become a standard training tool for any type of pool instructor, being able to see exactly where you hit the ball was super informative.

The only minor hiccup is that, as stated in the product documentation, sometimes it can confuse top vs bottom. Thankfully the app has a feature where you can quickly flip/flop the shot around so if it shows top right and you know you hit low right, the touch of a bottom will correct the top vs bottom. I only had this happen to me once or twice the whole time. Another player I had try it did have it happen more often but it was all on the same type of shot he was drilling on with it.


Overall, I give this a solid A+!! Very impressed, worked great, and was super informative. I definitely want one.

The chalk was my target position for this shot:

And some of the DigiBall readouts of fairly succesful attempts

When I looked at the numbers closer, this was one helluva Shot Chris!!!
You had some serious juice on it and hit that bad boy (CB) in a place most players can't without miscueing.
I know this bcuz we ran repeated shots over and over trying to see how far out we could get without doing so. When you see this representation on the screen, you know you're a bad man with the stroke to prove it.