Robot Moves Mini Helmets to Track Football Standings

For many people, American football isn’t mere casual entertainment; it is a passion — even an obsession. For those people, it is important to always know the current standing of every team in the NFL compared to every other team. Most people use apps or websites to keep track of that information, but Simon Schoar wanted something more interesting and built this robot that moves mini football helmets around on a shelf to mirror the standings.

Simon watches the Super Bowl every year, but doesn’t actually care much about the rest of the season. His brother, on the other hand, is a super fan and likes to keep up with American football standings. A few years ago, Simon bought his brother one of those sets of mini NFL helmets that people like to display on shelves. After buying a Creality Ender 3 3D printer, Simon decided to build his brother a robotic system for the helmet set. The robot picks up the mini helmets and rearranges their order on the shelf to correspond to current standings. A string of RGB LEDs above the helmets provide additional information and this system can track league, conference, division, and playoff standings.

Each mini helmet sits on a small 3D-printed stand that Simon designed for a forklift-style mechanism to pick up. That forklift mechanism rides on a long v-rail that spans the entire length of the shelf. One servo motor lifts the helmets and a second servo clamps down on the helmet stands to keep them from slipping. A set of arcade buttons at the top of the assembly let the user switch between the different standings or toggle power. An APA102C individually addressable RGB LED strip mounted above the helmets provides different color indicators for the standings depending on the current mode.

A Microchip AVR64DA32 microcontroller on a custom PCB controls the two forklift servo motors and the stepper motor that slides the mechanism along the v-rail. It uses an ESP8266 as a Wifi adapter to pull current standings from MySportsFeeds.com’s API service and Simon shelled out the $16/year to get live updates. This whole robotic system is open loop, so it can’t identify helmets or positions. Instead, it keeps a running log of where it places each helmet. If the system loses that information or it becomes inaccurate, the “initial setup” routine lets the user reset everything by loading the helmets one at a time.

If you want to build your on Mini Helmet Tracker, all of the files are available on Simon’s GitHub page.