The cats
at Novation spent the weekend working on (and playing with) Shot Light™. We discovered a few things we’d like to share.
Interestingly, our “professional” version is a lot simpler than the “driveway” version. You’d think it would be the opposite, right? Well, with the pro version (the one we’ll use for formal college and pro league games), there already exists a scorekeeper in charge of starting and resetting the shot clock. When the ball hits the hoop of there is a change in possession, the scorekeeper just presses a button and the shot clock is reset. You usually don’t have that luxury for our one-on-one driveway basketball games.
For the driveway version of Shot Light™, we do have a reset button that the player can press after a basket is scored. This resets the clock-just like the pro game-but what happens when you miss the shot? We added a sensor that can tell when the ball hits the rim and automatically resets the clock for missed shots. So cool.
For change of possession, we first tried a voice recognition system, but it had its drawbacks. It’s expensive and not very reliable in the heat of the game. So we created a small, wrist-worn wireless device. When the ball is stolen and possession changes, one of the players (the most reliable one) will reset the clock with a tap on the wrist.
The pro version has a set length of shot time, but we found that being able to adjust this time makes your driveway game much more fun. Shot Light™ driveway version can be easily set for a time of 35 seconds down to 5 seconds. Think about how crazy it will be to have a 5 second shot clock when you’re playing against your brother!
have to do with electronic gizmos? Sometimes the cats here at Novation develop devices just because they are curious. Dance Zone™ is a case in point. We’re working on the facts that 1) dancing is better exercise than walking, 2) dancing makes people happy, and 3) people cannot resist dancing to some songs. We wondered what would happen if we made sections of walkways into “dancing only” zones. So we grabbed some infrared distance sensors, and Arduino, a couple of speakers and our favorite MP3 music clips. Poof…there you have it-a portable dance zone. We’re testing it out now on a college campus, and will make it available to you once it is perfect. (yes, of course we will show you some video clips…coming soon!)
For the last few years we’ve been designing and building wild and wonderful devices for ourselves for various purposes…from fun electronic shoes, electronic basketball backboards and dance walking devices, to sophisticated instrumentation packages for machinery diagnosis and weather measurement. We were usually driven by curiosity-how will people react to pedestrian zones where they must dance? (answer: they laugh…a lot) Will the place kicker’s field goal attempt be knocked down by the wind? (answer: for sure) Can we make a portable airport moving sidewalk? (answer: uh huh, and it’s amazing) But sometimes we had specific needs that drove us to develop the devices-projects for sports broadcasters, industry leaders and government R&D. In all cases, we put a lot of time and thought into the devices, worked out the kinks, and thought they might be useful to many others around the world for fun and profit.