Impact of catching a ball

Other Hardware Sensors
1

I am trying to design a project for young children (a toy if you will) and need some advice. The general idea is

  • The child try's to catch the ball without setting the motion sensor off
  • If an impact is recognised it will make a sound (I was thinking one of theese:Car Horn - 12V (pair) - COM-10966 - SparkFun Electronics
  • You can throw it hard, but too hard and it will make the noise and the point will go to the other person

I tried following the Knock tutorial on the Arduino website, but I got a continual reading of 0 (printed the sensor output to the computer). If you have any idea of a) how to do this, b) how to fit this in a small ball or c) the components I should get please leave a reply.

Thanks!
Nick

2

This sounds very much like the catching an egg game.
I would use an accelerometer for this.

3

Grumpy_Mike:
This sounds very much like the catching an egg game.
I would use an accelerometer for this.

Could you point me to the tutorial / schematic?

4

check this - http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ADXL3xx -