06
Marcelo Ávila de Oliveira likes to practice basketball, and while most of us would be content to shoot and hopefully improve, he actually tracks his workouts. While figuring out the number of made baskets, misses, times, etc. is useful, it’s also quite boring and difficult, so he came up with a real-time scoreboard system to take care of this for him.
The device is mounted to an enclosure under the hoop, and uses an IR proximity sensor poking through Jerry West’s head to know when a ball has gone through. It also employs a vibration sensor to detect if the ball has hit the rim, and if the IR sensor isn’t triggered within three seconds, a miss is counted.
The setup’s Arduino Mega communicates with a custom smartphone app over Bluetooth, and displays statistics on the practice session. It even plays notification sounds for scores and misses, as shown in the video below.
