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The Tennis Ball Tester
For my senior capstone project, myself and five other engineering students were tasked with creating a system that can sort tennis balls based on their playability. Tennis balls lose their pressure overtime, leaving them unusable in 3-6 uses. My team created an automated system that holds up to 150 tennis balls, senses their pressure, and sorts them into playable and dead tennis ball categories. More on this design process and the prototype is described below.
Role / Engineer
Date / September 2021-April 2022
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Skills / Design thinking, Engineering Analysis,
Market analysis, CAD
Problem
My team of 6 student engineers were tasked with creating a tennis ball sensing and sorting mechanism that would be able to differentiate between the quality of balls, as they relate to performance on the court. This project was founded out of frustration and dissatisfaction with current sensing methodologies’ inefficiency and inaccuracy, primarily around a ball-by-ball squeeze test conducted by players or coaches.
Product Architecture
In thinking of how to tackle such a large scale project, we defined a geometric layout of our future product with all necessary systems integrated. The goal of this was to understand the limitations and structure of our product and to see it as a collection of subsystems. We then used this general layout to help understand all of the necessary functional elements of our future product and how the system would flow.
Product Architecture Diagram
Decomposed Product Architecture
Flow Diagram
Critical System
In the context of the tennis ball sorter, the Sensing Ball Properties component of our product is the critical system of interest, as it is the sub-function that provides the data required to designate balls as good or bad. We took care to prototype and test multiple different design options for this system in order to find the optimum design to integrate into the final system.
Vertical Disk Sensing
Auger Based Sensing
Compression Roller Sensing
"Can Crusher" Sensing
Compression Channel Sensing
Final Prototype
Design features:
Sheet Metal Hopper
Ball Agitator
Frame
Vertical Disk System
Integrated Motor
View our complete final report here.
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