Internet of Thrisbee™

Inspiration

Do you want to find out who your true friends are? Who likes you in secret? Who really hates you? You're in luck, and with just a simple game of Thrisbee™ you can now find out!

What it does

Pass it round, and see the stats on the cool display and enjoy your metrics! It'll show you plenty of useful information such as who's passing the Thrisbee™ to whom, who's the most popular, the least, how fair the game is and how much fun you're having!

How we built it

The main micro:bit is mounted on the underside of the Thrisbee™. Each person playing the game then has a micro:bit on their person broadcasting who they are over Bluetooth, and the Thrisbee™ uses the RSSI values of the player's bits broadcasts to determine who's holding it. The Thrisbee™ then relays the player information and its accelerometer values to a gateway bit connected to a laptop, which gets the data over serial, into matlab which plots graphs and key performance indicators in real time.

Challenges we ran into

The Bluetooth link had some issues of reliability when sending more data over the link, and not all data was received and recovered properly. We also worked on some mechanics calculations to calculate throw speed, impact, rotations speed and distance thrown, getting promising results but needing more time to implement them fully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made the Thrisbee™ communicate both with the player's bits and with the gateway bit simultaneously, enabling it to relay which player is holding or throwing it to the computer. It's also great fun and illuminating in terms of your social standing..

What we learned

We learned a lot about using Bluetooth to communicate between these devices, as well as getting familiar with the mbed platform and microcontroller to microcontroller communication. We also learned about the limitations of accelerometers and magnetometers, such as limited sampling rates and the importance of signal processing.

What's next for Internet of Thrisbee™

The next steps are using people's smartphones instead of micro:bits for the detection of who's holding it, and making an app that gets the data over Bluetooth from the Thrisbee™, processes it and shows all the graphs and metrics. Add a rechargeable battery, embed the microcontroller in an injection molded custom Thrisbee™, pair it with an induction charger and a smartphone app, and sell it to ultimate frisbee teams and anyone who likes fun!