Track Your Throws with This Smart Foam Football

If you’ve ever watched an (American) football game, you’ll see a quarterback throw a blimp-shaped ball to, depending on the skill level, incredible distances. Such a feat is possible due to a combination of forward and spinning motion that’s simple enough to learn, but few really understand how it works. Timothy Kanarsky and team, as the final project for their “Physics 4AL: Mechanics Laboratory” class at UCLA, decided to see just what’s going on when a Nerf football is thrown.

This particular Nerf Vortex ball was selected because of its stability during flight due to its tail mechanism, and the fact that it could easily be split open and modified to accept new electronics. The new augmentations include a NodeMCU ESP8266 board along with a battery and two MPU-6050 accelerometers. These accelerometers measure the axial and radial acceleration, and were used to analyze motion at different throw distances.

A button is implemented to start/stop tracking, and a beeper lets the users know when it’s actually recording data. This data can then be downloaded wirelessly via an FTP server running on the NodeMCU.

Code for the build is found here on GitHub and their NumPy analysis of the data if available as well. The TLDR version of what they found is that both the axial and radial acceleration spike when initially thrown, but settle down to a lower level before the catch. As the ball continuously spirals through the air, however, the total magnitude of radial acceleration is much higher than then axial component.