Best PAL : Ball Exercise Sound Tracking PAL

Abstract: The PAL (Practise and Learn) Original is a ball boardconsisting of three wooden boards placed in a triangle, developedto practise football players’ passing ability and firsttouch. The former Swedish international footballer JessicaLandstr¨om observed that these ball boards can, if they areimproved, help footballers to develop even more skills whilepracticing alone. Landstr¨om’s idea was to put lamps on topoff the ball boards which light up when a certain ball boardexpects to receive a pass. This would force the player tolook up instead of looking at the ball and hence improvetheir vision.We concluded that speaking also is important withinfootball. So our objective became to follow up on the developmentof the simple PAL Original to a ball board whichrotates towards a sound source. We wanted to achieve thiswithout configuring the PAL Original’s construction.With the purpose of executing the idea we needed toestimate the angle between a sound source and a face ofthe ball board, rotate the ball board with an electric motor,communicate wirelessly between units and detect a ball hitwhen the ball board receives a pass.The final prototype consists of two systems, one systemexecuting the sound source localization and rotation andthe other system executing the detection of ball hit andwireless communication.The first system uses time difference of arrival (TDOA)between incoming sound for three sound sensors to calculatean angle, which in turn is communicated to a DC motorthat executes the rotation.The other system combines an LED to light up whena pass is expected, an accelerometer to detect a pass, andradio transceivers to communicate with each other. Whenat least three of these devices are used a randomizing algorithmdecides which one should light its LED next whenthe first one detects a pass.