The development and implementation of an innovative and amusing spin on the common ball-juggling activity was the idea decided upon by the team. The basic concept is to develop a set of LED-colored juggling balls that will respond in different manners to different situations such as changing colors when drop. Additionally, the speed, the number of times thrown and the maximum height achieved by the balls will also be computed and displayed. The team chose upon this particular project due to two simple reasons: one, the team believed juggling balls to be more interesting than any of the other activities displayed in lab; and two, the concept of juggling has always been a difficult one and each of the members in the team have a desire to be able to juggle.
The goal of this project was to create a product to revolutionize the way people juggle. Primarily, the goal was to make the activity more visually appealing for the audience. While juggling certainly is entertaining to see, simply watching a person juggle three balls for a few minutes can be kind of repetitive. The idea of this project was to introduce LEDs to the balls, so that together, the balls produce a kind of light show, which will be much more entrancing for the audience than the typical set of juggling balls. Equipped with a set of LEDs, an accelerometer and an Arduino board to run the entire system, the balls will be able to detect changes in acceleration and use this data to change the color of the LEDs correspondingly, which will result in each ball changing color every time it is caught and thrown.
In addition to making juggling a more visually appealing process for the audience, the goal was to benefit the juggler in some way. It was decided to use the accelerometer embedded in the ball, which already detects throws in order to change the color of the balls, to count the number of catches and throws in a round of juggling. The ball will register when it is caught and thrown by the change in acceleration and will then add one to the counter which will be running, simultaneously sending the data to the computer using the embedded Bluetooth chip.
The final product of this project is a set of three juggling balls which return a set of outputs based on input taken from an accelerometer placed inside each ball. The first output is visual, in the form of red/green/blue LEDs set inside the balls which light up when turn on and change color every time the ball reads a change in acceleration. This change should come every time the ball is caught and thrown back up into the air, making the every ball change color once every juggling turn.
The other output is a reading of the number of throws a person completes before stopping or dropping the ball. The accelerometer will use the same readings taken to change the color to determine when it is thrown back into the air. Whenever it senses this, it will count one throw. In order to track the total number of throws, the balls will have to communicate with each other in some way to keep a running total of throws and catches. This should be able to be accomplished through the use of blue tooth Arduino accessories, which can work with any Arduino board to connect one or more Arduinos to either themselves or a computer or phone, which can track the data and return the desired output.
