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  • Author Author: tariq.ahmad
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How to Make a Basketball Auto Score Keeper Using Colour Sensing -- Episode 579

Everything is a competition at Lorraine’s home and work, especially when it comes to throwing balls into basketball hoops. Watch as she upgrades it to automatically detect who has scored a basket using a colour sensor, a micro:bit and multi-coloured balls.

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Bill of Material:

Product Name Manufacturer Quantity Buy Kit
micro:bit version 1 BBC 2 Buy Now
DF Robot Sensor Board, RGB Colour DFROBOT 1 Buy Now
RGB LED strip 1 metre MULTICOMP PRO 1 Buy Now
Male to female jumper wires MULTICOMP PRO 1 Buy Now
Pin Header AMP _ TE CONNECTIVITY 1 Buy Now
Kitronik Edge Connector Kitronik 1 Buy Now
 

Additional Parts:

Basketball hoop
Coloured balls

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  • You could perhaps link your previous giant 7-seg display to the hoop as the scoreboard.

    However, if you replace the LED RGB strip with LED RGB pixel strip, you could also keep score by displaying the percentage of baskets scored by proportion of colour displayed on the strip.

    With pixel strip you could also do some fancy swishy animation effects when the ball goes into the basket or during periods of inactivity or proximity / sound detection. Or perhaps have it act as a countdown timer for timed games.

    (In basketball, I thought it was pretty normal to aim for the small square on the backboard as opposed to the hoop?)   

  • I recall back in the TAOS days (before AMS / Osram), there were various papers presented about those colour sensors which talked about the transform matrix required to get meaningful colour data out of them. This one is aimed at the TCS230 but still referred to by the TCS34725 documentation.

    https://ams.com/documents/20143/36005/ColorSensors_AN000518_1-00.pdf/16f9c551-6778-1a39-d775-e53ed5b9af3f

    I was looking at these sensors a while back as a cheap way to build a colorimeter device for colour calibration workflows involving projection.

    You may also want to try masking off the ambient light if possible so that the sensor is only illuminated by light originating from its own white LED light source. 

     

    The sensor if I recall correctly, has a sleep mode state upon power up, so might be what you are experiencing if the LEDs are causing a sufficient power drop.      

    With all the recent rain then a Florabrella type project may be more appropriate.

    /challenges-projects/design-challenges/get-closer/b/blog/posts/the-florabrella-finale