HELP - Highschool students Engineering Project

Hello! My partner and I are seeking guidance with our engineering project. We are attempting to create a local positioning system to track a hockey puck and skates. We have been looking into Arduino boards but are unsure which board would give us the most success in creating a product. We will need to connect Bluetooth beacons and receivers in order to determine the location of the puck and each player's skate. Please comment if you have any advice!!

Is this a theft-prevention scheme, or an in-game scheme?

If this is “in game” the biggest problem you will have is anything surviving the shock loads imposed.
Tracking items in a small arena with accuracy and speed will be no mean feat either . I would investigate what is existing in the market place for other sports to gauge its feasibility .

We will need to connect Bluetooth beacons and receivers in order to determine the location of the puck and each player's skate.

That won't work without an expensive base station (for example), but Pozyx might. Still not cheap.

I assume it's in game. How about a high-res camera above the field, with some powerful image recognition?

If you're now looking at Arduino boards without having an idea on how to do the actual positioning you're doing it wrong. First come up with a sensor that can sense the thing you want to sense: the exact location of fast moving objects that are subject to very high g forces (for the puck I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the 100-1,000g kinds of high). That is two major problems: the actual positioning, and surviving the repeated impact. Of course it should not change the weight of the puck or you affect the game.

The skates are less bad as you have more space and less weight limitations. G forces are also likely to be less extreme, still they're going to be an issue.

Now when you have decided on a sensor system, you can think of a way on reading the data at a useful precision and frequency. When you have that, you can think of a way of transmitting that to some kind of base station. Finally you can design that base station, and there an Arduino may or may not (probably not considering the overall requiremnets) be appropriate. An Arduino board (the wearable ones) may come in useful to strap to the player's legs to read the sensors there, and transmit the readings to your base station.

abbykkrause:
Hello! My partner and I are seeking guidance with our engineering project. We are attempting to create a local positioning system to track a hockey puck and skates. We have been looking into Arduino boards but are unsure which board would give us the most success in creating a product. We will need to connect Bluetooth beacons and receivers in order to determine the location of the puck and each player's skate. Please comment if you have any advice!!

Just how close do you need to track these positions? Within 1 meter? Still be very expensive IF you can beacon the puck.

How many players all at once?

Advice? Eat less sugar and you won't get so many wild ideas.

I sometimes wonder just who comes up with some of these high school projects, tracking multiple high-speed, close proximity targets simultaneously is hardly a trivial task. Even more difficult if you need to do this during any type of official game play, since most sports are unlikely to allow modifications to equipment used in the game. As was suggested, optical tracking with cameras might be the most practical, but trying to track skates with cameras, and keep track of which two skates belong to the same player, would be quite challenging.

A little net-skim brings up "bluetooth beacons" as "locators" but actually reading how that is tells about proximity to receiver(s) as locating.

So how close must the location be known? It will take a grid of receivers being that close to know and as big as the area that you intend to locate the beacon within.

Then just drop in a whole pile of beacons knowing that only 1 signal can be read at a time, yeah that's High School work uh-huh.

Sorry but this is as unreal as the SJW worldview.

david_2018:
I sometimes wonder just who comes up with some of these high school projects, tracking multiple high-speed, close proximity targets simultaneously is hardly a trivial task. Even more difficult if you need to do this during any type of official game play, since most sports are unlikely to allow modifications to equipment used in the game. As was suggested, optical tracking with cameras might be the most practical, but trying to track skates with cameras, and keep track of which two skates belong to the same player, would be quite challenging.

if you watch the making of the film Alita battle angel, the actor wears dozens of dots. each represents a postion of a muscle.
facial muscles, arm, elbo, wrist, shoulder, fingers.....
All of that is tracked in real time and then digitized to make a motion picture character.
Avatar, running, and jumping
Star Wars light sabers.

Why should kids think that tracking a few measly ice skater would be be hard ?

it is not difficult at all. get a green room, dozens of cameras, super computers to tie in all the different cameras and Bob's your Uncle !

I think another way of asking the question might be what in a kid experience would make them think it would be hard to do ?

abbykkrause:
Hello! My partner and I are seeking guidance with our engineering project. We are attempting to create a local positioning system to track a hockey puck and skates. We have been looking into Arduino boards but are unsure which board would give us the most success in creating a product. We will need to connect Bluetooth beacons and receivers in order to determine the location of the puck and each player's skate. Please comment if you have any advice!!

the reality is that tracking a thing with any accuracy is difficult at best.
with radio waves, one can triangulate the postion of a thing. I believe that ships at sea used to use the stars.
50 years ago, the would use the public broadcast radio towers, then adopted a specific technology for near shore LORAN
it would help to let a boat know where there are. within about a mile or so.
GPS now puts that to withing 5 meters or so.
the technology works with radio waves and timing of the receiving of them. radio travels at the speed of light. so 300,000 KM per second. to get a location of within 300,000 KM, you only need to test once per second.
of course our beloved Arduino can do much faster testing, so we can get to withing a few meters.
at the level of current technology we have a hard time getting one RC toy car to have much accuracy inside of a stadium.
trying to get 1 puck,12 players with 24 skates and 3 refs with 6 skates to all send and recive postioning signals is currently beyond the abilities of the available technology.
As has been noted, using cameras and specialized software to look at an image, digitize it, then assign values to the images, then place them in some 2 dimensional location would take some good cameras and some extensive computing
power.
if each player had a beacon on their helmit and 2 or more cameras were to follow each individual player, then the angles of the cameras could be used to triangulate the location of each player on a 2 dimensional grid.
overhead cameras might be able to do the same for the puck.
but at first glance, you would need some financial help from a professional hockey team !
if this can be done, I think it is safe to say that it is not something an Arduino would be capable of.

I did ask how close locations need to be determined. End ice, center ice, somewhere near a goal are very possible with enough money and code talent.

We get no answers which leaves me wondering if what we question/ask-about had not been considered in choosing a project.

It's the coding for this that stacks up along with the number of devices that may well be the longest part.

You can take something that you have 95% of and by the time you're done you laugh about 95% done, 50% to go as optimistic.
You're in HS and that project, to know a puck and players skates to within 2 meters is something I wouldn't charge the college kids we get with doing.

This may be hard to take but a project that dies after a lot of work and money went in... that is far worse.

If you want both skates, 2m resolution is not enough as both feet of the player would always be within that margin of error. I don't think a player's feet are more than 1m apart most of the time.

So under the ice put a grid of receivers 100mm apart and get blobs of sensors reporting each "beacon" where center-of-blob is the within 100mm location of the beacon.

I was on a project in 87-88 that did just that for beam-interrupt touch screens.

An Olympic size ice hockey rink is 30x60 m, every 100 mm a sensor, that'd be 300x600 = 180,000 sensors.

Imagining that this are super simple sensors, say just something that produces on/off signals, I start to wonder how it would even be possible to read that many. It must be possible, touch screens do higher resolution, but only recently they can handle more than one touch and OP is looking for 17 or so, maybe 27 if they want to follow the sticks on the ice as well.

Identifying which of the objects touches a sensor adds a whole layer of complexity of course.

GoForSmoke:
I was on a project in 87-88 that did just that for beam-interrupt touch screens.

Xerox 5090?

OP has been very quiet since her (going off the abby in the name) question almost 48h ago :wink:

wvmarle:
I don't think a player's feet are more than 1m apart most of the time.

Hmmm, you've never seen me skate, then. Mine would seldom be closer than that.

elvon_blunden:
Xerox 5090?

OP has been very quiet since her (going off the abby in the name) question almost 48h ago :wink:

That was for corporate jet aircraft systems training carrels we made for FlightSafety. We were way ahead of our time there.

It is the weekend and the partners may want to get their plans together before posting.

Perhaps there is no need to tell where the skates and puck are closely at all. At least that's my only big hope with this.
Whatever they do, I hope it succeeds but I won't tell them it's okay to jump off a cliff.

You know, a project to tell how far apart the skates of only 1 player are at any tenth of a second would be a challenge. What would work for one, magnet and 3 Hall Sensors (1 per XYZ) for instance would not work for many.