Without ball detection, what is this game even for?

We decided early on to use an IR Frame due to its balance of cost and detection capabilities. Recall earlier on that we had a test with a smaller IR Frame to prove its functionality. We also received some supplier videos that showed it being able to detect balls being thrown at it. (I'm glad they did not think it was weird when we asked them to try that out for us).

Our original design had the IR Frame mounted flush with the LED lights since that provided the simplest design. However, we found a new potential issue once we got the huge IR Frame ready for testing with the LED backwall.

The IR Frame being used is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the one used in original testing. The field of view of the sensors is the same as the one on the smaller frame AND it takes much longer for the IR beams to travel from one end to the other. This meant that when we mounted the frame onto the wall, it failed to detect balls being thrown at it at a reasonable speed. There could be multiple reasons for this failure. An obvious potential failure is the fact that due to the thin field of view, a very small portion of the ball ends up being detected. This was not an issue with the smaller frame because the signal was interrupted quickly enough. However, on this larger frame, the response time is necessarily slower.

After momentarily freaking out that we wasted money on a frame that wouldn't work for our purposes, we decided we should find a way for a larger portion of the ball to be in the field of view and find a way to slow down the ball post-impact. The solution was mounting the frame at a set distance away from the backwall. This allows the ball to travel into the frame instead of just barely into its field of view. Furthermore, the diffusion fabric used in the previous blog post also acts to absorb some of the momentum so the ball doesn't rebound as quickly.

Below is the testing to show that this is now working as expected for our purposes.