Best PAL : Ball Exercise Sound Tracking PAL

Abstract: The PAL (Practise and Learn) Original is a ball board consisting of three wooden boards placed in a triangle, developed to practise football players’ passing ability and first touch. The former Swedish international footballer Jessica Landström observed that these ball boards can, if they are improved, help footballers to develop even more skills while practicing alone. Landstr¨om’s idea was to put lamps on top off the ball boards which light up when a certain ball board expects to receive a pass. This would force the player to look up instead of looking at the ball and hence improve their vision. We concluded that speaking also is important within football. So our objective became to follow up on the development of the simple PAL Original to a ball board which rotates towards a sound source. We wanted to achieve this without configuring the PAL Original’s construction. With the purpose of executing the idea we needed to estimate the angle between a sound source and a face of the ball board, rotate the ball board with an electric motor, communicate wirelessly between units and detect a ball hit when the ball board receives a pass. The final prototype consists of two systems, one system executing the sound source localization and rotation and the other system executing the detection of ball hit and wireless communication. The first system uses time difference of arrival (TDOA) between incoming sound for three sound sensors to calculate an angle, which in turn is communicated to a DC motorthat executes the rotation. The other system combines an LED to light up when a pass is expected, an accelerometer to detect a pass, and radio transceivers to communicate with each other. When at least three of these devices are used a randomizing algorithm decides which one should light its LED next when the first one detects a pass.