Smart Table Tennis Machine

Team

Categories
IoT, Wireless

Overview

Table tennis, a sport dating back to the mid-1860s while also being an Olympic level sport since the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea has always been a widely played game both in the amateur and professional levels. With regards to machine assistance options there is limited variation that is available for purchasing. This project wishes to combat that lack of versatility available with regards to currently marketed table tennis machines by making improvements pertaining to its shooting mechanism and aggregation of data to display user performance.

There are a total of three major components which exist within this project, they are the hardware component, the phone application, and the real-time database. The hardware component consists of a raspberry pi which reads data from the several sensors found within the machine and outputs signals to motors which are used for adjusting the shooting angle of the machine, shooting speed and spin applied to the ball. There are also less prominent components that exist within the machine such as the Archimedes’ screw that picks up balls to be dropped into the shooting mechanism and a custom PCB where all components are connected to. The phone application created on Android Studio acts as a medium between the operator and the machine, its purpose is to provide the user with an intuitive platform for setting up their game options. The pages which are most important within the android application are the game options page which allows the user to set up specified options 2 for the machine that will be constantly shot. The random settings page which sets random options for the machine which changes within every specified time interval. Lastly there is the statistics page which displays to the user their performance with regards to the games played.

The real-time database created for this project is used for a multitude of purposes: registration of users, uploading of system configurations from the app to the machine (vertical and horizontal angle of shot, spin applied to the ball and speed at which the ball is shot), and recording user statistics to be viewed by said user.