Design and Building of the Basketball Hoop
Design and Building of the Table Top Basketball Game
Coding with Arduino

Team Blue Storm: Joana Santos

Published April 12, 2016

Basketball Tabletop Game

This is a tabletop basketball game where the players will have 15 seconds to score as many baskets as they can.

IntermediateFull instructions provided829

Things used in this project

Hardware components

SparkFun RedBoard

Laser Cutter

Photogate

3D Printer

Story

Design and Building of the Basketball Hoop

My project started as something I was going to 3D print just for fun. I started playing around with AutoDesk Fusion 360 and came up with a design for my basketball hoop.

My first design.

I had never 3D printed anything before, so when I finished the design in the picture above I thought that it would turn out exactly like the picture, but no…

It was a big mess when I arrived at the lab the next day!

After I realized that the 3D printer wasn’t able to print everything that I designed on the computer I decided to try another way to design my basketball hoop.

I noticed that on my first printing attempt the arcs that were connected to the backboard and to the base did not print very well, so I started by taking those out.

1st hoop but without the back support.

Right after I took the arcs out it stroke me that the best way to approach this was by designing it in different pieces.

I started with the pole. I had the idea of making it like a screw that would just screw into the base.

Screw Type Pole

Once I printed this I realized that it didn’t work, so I had to start over. I decided to go with the solid post and in order for it to fit in the base hole, I would just have to use Sand Paper to make it a little thinner; same thing for the backboard hole.

1st Design with separate pieces.

On the design above I still had the backboard and the rim together, which looking back at the first printed version didn’t turn out very well. For this reason I decided to make my Basketball Hoop into 4 different pieces.

1 / 4 • Backboard

And this was how the first prototype using separate pieces turned out.

1st Hoop

After knowing that this design worked I decided to play a little with the filament colors and created a new hoop.

1 / 2 • Breakdown of the hoop.

After finishing the hoop I decided to print a little basketball so that I could turn this cool thing that I had just designed and printed, into a cool small game, a table top game.

Basketball

Design and Building of the Table Top Basketball Game

After having created this little game, that everyone that passed by the lab would play with, my teacher, Dave Holzwarth, asked me why not turning this into a bigger but still a table top game and make that my final project for the class.

I started brainstorming and designing my new game.

Initial Idea

I had decided on the size of the table for the game.

Next I wanted to create rules for the game, and how to get different points within the game.

1 / 3

Now I had to decide what I wanted to base of the game to be like, what kind of material. I thought it would be cool if I made an all 3D printed game, so I started sketching.

1 / 3

After sketching it on paper, I started designing it on AutoDesk Fusion 360.

3D design of the base for the base of the hoop.

The first design (picture above) looked like it would print fine, so I just went ahead and printed it.

1 / 2

On the pictures above you can see that there is a hole missing, so I had to redesign it and reprint it.

1 / 2

The first problem that I found on this design was that the ball that I had 3D printed did not bounce on the 3D printed surface, which was not good since the whole point of the game is to bounce the ball into the rim.

I thought that maybe the problem was that the other pieces were missing, so I designed 2 other pieces of the base “puzzle” to try to see if the problem above went away.

1 / 2

As I was still trying to solve the first problem, another one was found. This time what kept happening, every time I tried to print the pieces designed above, was that the 3D printer would just stop doing the job. After 2 tries I realized that there was nothing I could do about it, so I moved on.

What I decided to do next, while I was still deciding out of what I wanted to build my game base, was to use the very first technique that our teacher taught us in this class: cardboard stacking. (check my other project – cardboard furniture)

1 / 3

I decided to do the base of my game out of wood.

I started thinking about what I wanted to have on the base of the game. I knew I wanted it to resemble the floor of my school’s basketball court, and I also knew that I didn’t have enough time until the presentation and deadline day, so I decided to design the game with just one line, counting only one point for each basket made.

I laser cut the “3-point line”. The way we use our laser cutter is that we create whatever we want to print on a Word Document and then we send that document to print in the Laser Cutter.

As you can see in the picture above, the lines are not straight. This happened because when I designed my semicircle on the Word Document I made it very small. Once I expanded it to the correct measurements on the Laser Cutter Software, the figure got pixelated :(

Coding with Arduino

I took the robotics class that my school offers last year, and the programming language that we used was a C-based programming language. Once I realized that in this class we had to program with Arduino it was already too close to the deadline to start learning how to program with Arduino.

I had the help of Dan Chayes with the programming and with the soldering. He taught me how to work as we worked on getting the code for what I needed for my game.

Going back to the first sketch that I made for this project, I knew that I wanted a display with the clock (time) and another display that showed how many points the players had scored.

For the display with the points of each player I was thinking that the ref of the game would have buttons to add or remove points during the game, but my teacher gave me the idea of using a Photogate instead.

What me and Dan ended up programming was a Photogate connected to the display that each time that the laser of the Photogate was interrupted it would add a point to the display.

1 / 2

For the display with the timer I connected a little buzzer so that once the time was up the buzzer would sound. The total time to play this game was 15 seconds.

I left a couple of inches of wood on the left side of the base of the game because I knew that I needed a place to put the Sparkfun RedBoards.

I realized also that once a player scored a basket the ball would bounce back up, counting it as more than one basket, so I decided to 3D print a little ramp to prevent that from happening.

I used Velcro to keep all the RedBoards in place, and I also used it to put the Photogate in place, under the hoop.

1 / 2

And this was how the game turned out…

Code

/*
 VernierPhotogateTimmer (v 2013.12.09)
 Monitors a Vernier Photogate connected to BTD connector. 

 Very smiple code to read the Vernier Photogate when connected to digital port 1 of the
 Sparkfun / Vernier shield.

 Each time the photogate is blocked then a "basket" is scored, the number of baskets
 counter is increment and the LED (#13) is light up for 1/4 of a second

 D. Chayes, Mercersburg Makerlab Spring 2016

Added support for SparkFun 7 Segment shield with dispaly

To get this code to work, attached an Serial7Segment to an Arduino Uno using:
 A5 to SCL
 A4 to SDA
 VIN to PWR
 GND to GND

 */
 
#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
#include <Wire.h>

#define DISPLAY_ADDRESS1 0x71     //This is the default address of the OpenSegment

#define FALSE 0
#define TRUE 1

#define GATE_MODE 1              // photogate mode definitions 
#define PULSE_MODE 2
#define PENDULUM_MODE 3

const int ledPin = 13;       // re-purposed pin 13 to tie to the Serial 7 Segment
const int photogatePin = 2; // default pin if plugged into Digital 1 on SparkFun Vernier Shield 

int mode = PULSE_MODE; 
int blocked = FALSE;   // set true when the sensor is blocked
int basket = FALSE;    // set true if a basket event happened
int basket_count = 0;  // number of baskets scored

void setup() {
 
  attachInterrupt(0, photogateEvent, CHANGE);    // photogate_event
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);

  Wire.begin();                                 //Join the bus as master
  Wire.beginTransmission(DISPLAY_ADDRESS1);     //Send reset command to the display, return cursor to begining
  Wire.write('v');
  Wire.endTransmission();

  i2cSendValue( basket_count);    // set the display to '0'

  Serial.begin(9600);             // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("");
  Serial.println(" we begin ");

}

void loop () { 
    
   if (basket == TRUE) {
     Serial.print(" Score !!!! ");
     Serial.println( ++basket_count);
     i2cSendValue( basket_count);     //Send the count to the display
  
     basket = FALSE;
     digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
     delay(100);
     digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);
  }
  
}
/*************************************************
 * photogateEvent()
 * 
 * Interrupt service routine. Handles capturing 
 * the time and saving this to memory when the 
 * photogate issues an interrupt on pin 2.
 * 
 * As it is currently written, the photogate 
 * will only work on Digital Port 1.
 *************************************************/
void photogateEvent() { 
  if ( digitalRead(photogatePin) == 1)
      blocked = TRUE;
  else { 
      blocked = FALSE;
      basket = TRUE;
  }
  
}


/*
 * Given a number, i2cSendValue chops up an integer into four values and sends them out over I2C
*/
void i2cSendValue(int tempCycles) {  
  Wire.beginTransmission(DISPLAY_ADDRESS1); 
  Wire.write(tempCycles / 1000); //Send the left most digit
  tempCycles %= 1000; //Now remove the left most digit from the number we want to display
  Wire.write(tempCycles / 100);
  tempCycles %= 100;
  Wire.write(tempCycles / 10);
  tempCycles %= 10;
  Wire.write(tempCycles); //Send the right most digit
  Wire.endTransmission(); //Stop I2C transmission
 
}

// display code //
#include <Wire.h>
#include <TimerOne.h>

#define FALSE 0
#define TRUE 1

#define DISPLAY_ADDRESS1 0x71

int cycles = 0;
int current_seconds = 0;
int isr_event = FALSE;
int count_down = 15;

// buzzer code //
const int buzzerPin = 9;
const int songLength = 18;
char notes[] = "CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC";
int beats[] = {1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1};
int tempo = 100;

// button code //
const int button1Pin = 2;  // pushbutton 1 pin
const int ledPin =  13;    // LED pin
int starttime;
int endtime;


void setup () {   // display code //
  
  Wire.begin();

  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Open Segment Example Code");

  Wire.beginTransmission(DISPLAY_ADDRESS1);
  Wire.write('v');
  Wire.endTransmission();

  Timer1.initialize(1000000);
  Timer1.attachInterrupt(display_seconds);
  Serial.println("Configuration Complete\n");
  i2cSendValue(count_down);

  pinMode(buzzerPin, OUTPUT);   // buzzer code //

  pinMode(button1Pin, INPUT);   // button code //
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println (" We begin ");
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);

}

void loop() {

  int i, duration;
  int button1State;       // display code //
   
  if (isr_event == TRUE ) {
    isr_event = FALSE;

    if ( count_down != -1) {
      i2cSendValue( count_down);
      count_down--;
    }

    if ( count_down == -1) {    // buzzer code //
      
      for (i = 0; i < songLength; i++){ 
        duration = beats[i] * tempo;
        if (notes[i] == ' ')        
         delay(duration);           
        else {                      
          tone(buzzerPin, frequency(notes[i]), duration);
          delay(duration);          
        }
      }

      delay (5000);
      count_down = 15;
     }

/*  button1State = digitalRead(button1Pin);   // button code //

  if (((button1State == LOW))) {
    starttime=micros();
    while (digitalRead(button1Pin) == LOW)
      endtime=micros();
    Serial.println( starttime);
    Serial.println( endtime);    
  if ( (endtime - starttime) > 2000 )
    count_down = 10;
    Serial.println ( "Reset");
    } */
  }
}

void display_seconds() {    // display code //

  isr_event = TRUE ;
 }

void i2cSendValue(int tempCycles) {

  Wire.beginTransmission(DISPLAY_ADDRESS1);
  Wire.write (" ");
  Wire.write (" ");
  Wire.write(tempCycles / 10);
  tempCycles %=10;
  Wire.write(tempCycles);
  Wire.endTransmission();  

}

int frequency(char note)  // buzzer code //
{

  int i;
  const int numNotes = 8;  
  char names[] = { 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'a', 'b', 'C' };
  int frequencies[] = {262, 294, 330, 349, 392, 440, 494, 523};
  
  for (i = 0; i < numNotes; i++) {
    if (names[i] == note) {
      return(frequencies[i]);
    }
  }
  return(0);
}

Credits

Joana Santos

4 projects • 5 followers

Thanks to Dave Holzwarth and Dan Chayes.

Basketball Tabletop Game