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Thank God for YouTube. Providing free mass scale distribution to creators almost instantaneously has generated a lot of garbage content but also some real masterpieces. So much fun to watch this.
That channel (Stuff Made Here) is like every Engineer/ Machinists wet dream come true... Really loved his content.
I'm surprised someone with his skills doesn't have better/cheaper solution for medium amperage power distribution.
He could have gotten a sponsor, or just didn't care about that part of the problem.

Sometimes the rabbit holes you might encountered aren't interesting.

These motors won't be at full power for more than 100 milliseconds at a time anyway. It's fine to overload regular outlets by 10x for 100ms - and the specs of breakers even specifically allow for this use case.

Big appliances like air conditioners, especially old non-inverter ones, will usually do that.

Really cool project. I was a bit confused about his explanation on measuring where the anchors were in space. Why would a tape measure not be enough?

I was also a bit surprised that more primitive CV wasn't used to track the ball--he had to freeze the ball and then machine holes into the ball to insert tracking objects. I would have thought that image recognition could have solved the problem without the trackers. Maybe the issue was that this requires very low latency?

> Why would a tape measure not be enough?

Tape measures are bendy and would require keeping / knowing the right angles even if the walls and floor are not completely straight. Then you get measurement error on top (both in the wall plane coordinates and how far does the attachment bit sticks out) that skews everything a bit.

He doesn't need to know the anchor positions accurately - this was extra work he didn't need to do because he has feedback on the hoop position (via the cameras), so even very rough measurements will be fine.

The 'cable slack takeup' devices are also unnecessary because that can be done in software - you can put a virtual spring in the motor control feedback loop to make it act as springy or rigid as you like.

I can imagine the need for both came about from previous (unseen) design iterations that had low frame rate visual feedback and motors without feedback at all.