Comment by denvrede | Hacker News Reader

Comment by denvrede | Hacker News Reader

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I want to build a digital / smart foosball table with features like

* automated goal detection

* trigger things like lighten up the field on specific events (e.g. a goal)

* build a league backend / frontend and player management

* allow players to "login" via NFC on the table itself

There are a lot of ideas and questions right now. I pitched the idea to my employer to make it a continous "hackathon" for the employees. If that gets rejected I have at least one colleague that wants to build it in private.

Of course the idea is to make at least the software stack open-source (and give instructions on the integrated / used HW) but before that there is a lot to think about regarding the architecture ("offline" only? connect to a "cloud" component for league management outside of the office?).

That would be awesome. I once developed an PWA called the FoosTracker. It's still up (not sure if it's fully functional): https://myfoostracker.firebaseapp.com. It allowed combination of players to form teams and challenge other teams. It used a kahoot-like system for setting up matches. It did a bunch of statistics. About building your table: Remember that playability is king. Consider buying a great table and modifying it (as little as possible) instead of building it yourself from scratch.

Unfortunately the linked UI is in an endless loop on my side and won't open :/ Yup the plan was to buy a (used) table which can also be disassembled to take a look inside and place the sensors where they need to be :) Fortunately they are not that pricey.

Maybe with computer vision it could be a simple app on a phone and work for any table (after some calibration)?

Yup already thought about that but IMO it's much more work and prone to errors compared to just installing some sensors. Want to get that running ASAP and after that we can look into CV options. Already found a project [0] that tried to accomplish that with OpenCV but it seems it's abandoned.

[0] https://github.com/StudentCV/TableSoccerCV

If you can track the ball reliably like the guy from Stuff Made Here does on some of his projects it would maybe be a first step? Anyway this sounds like a super fun project! Good luck!

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