Foosball table part 2

Week 2
I was never an avid Foosball player. I decided to go on YouTube and watch people play Foosball. I wanted to get a better idea of how the user interacts with their plastic men. I came across this video.


It was then I realized Jeff and I's big woops! Our user has the ability to make the men kick however in Foosball the user has to be able to move their men side to side as well. We thought about possible solutions. Adding another ball and some more servo motors was a solution but it seemed unrealistic. We didn't think the Arduino board could power up more servos plus the user couldn't pay attention to his feet and watch the game at the same time. The user would of had to stay clear of what ball meant kick and what ball meant shift all while watching the ball.
We found this video on Youtube and it gave us a new idea.



Moving the table instead of the handle was the best solution. The user would only need to focus on kicking the ball. The ball would never be stuck in a corner because the table is constantly moving. We added one servo motor to the bottom of our cardboard box. It made the box tilt side to side every second. The ball moved on its own as well.
After numerous amounts of user testing, we came to the conclusion that the switch worked best if the user stomped on the bean bag. This will no longer be a kicking game.

This week we also decided to add a scoreboard. The scoreboard is giving us more problems then we expected. We were able to figure out how to get the score board to display numbers 1-9 but we cant figure out how to get it to add plus 1 when a player scores. We turned the ball into a switch similar to the way we turned the users foot into a switch. Once the ball made contact with the goal, the scoreboard would add 1. For some reason the circuit is picking up a lot of background noise. The scoreboard adds 1 whether or not the circuit is completed. In class they suggested we use conductive paint.

For next week Jeff and I plan to finish housing. We cant decided whether or not to use an already assemble d Foosball table or to create our own out of wood. We will also look more in to conductive paint