There’s something irresistible about throwing Pokeballs at unexpectedly appearing creatures. But wait. When did you actually, physically throw a Pokeball? Swiping over colored pixels wasn’t enough for [Trey Keown], so he built a real, throwable, Pokemon-catching Pokeball for Pokemon Go.
For his build, [Trey] acquired an off-the-shelf foam Pokeball, from which he removed the original “light and sound” guts and some of the foam filling to make space for actual, real Pokemon a TI SensorTag 2.0. This little, self-contained IoT development board comes with BLE and an accelerometer, so on the hardware side, there wasn’t much more to do than stuffing it into the prepped foam ball.
[Trey] went on to write an iOS app that accesses the accelerometer data from his Pokeball. If the acceleration values surpass a certain threshold, his app writes a trigger command to a file that he set up to be regularly polled by a user input emulation macro app named AutoTouch. AutoTouch emulates the swipe that throws the Pokeball in the game.
Even if it was just translucent CGI, it might actually have been a real bummer for some fans, that Pokemon Go was released without any sort of physical Pokeballs after they had such a prominent role in the game’s trailer. A missed merchandise opportunity for Nintendo and Niantic, or one yet to come? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the video, where [Trey] demonstrates his build:
should have put a motor for movement feedback when catching a Monster … pfff…. lame :p
Nice idea. Having it jolt around in your hand a bit after picking it up would be nice too.
Love it! Maybe in a future revision. I’m planning on doing something with Pokestops next, I’ll add a few updates to the Pokeball as well :)
Nice! I would have attached the pokeball to a string for me to pull it back after throwing it!
A Yo-Yo? ;)
I did consider that – I wanted to get some fingerless gloves like Ash has and attach some fishing line to it. But then the line gets tangled after a bit, and I didn’t figure it was worth the effort.
Will you ever decide to sell this or have you made a tut?
In its current form, it requires a jailbroken or rooted phone. So I’m probably not going to sell it, considering how many people that rules out. I’ll create a project on hackaday.io and post the code, so look out for that. I’m focusing my efforts on a related project right now.
You could try stripping the mechanism from an automatically returning yoyo and adding that, they’re cheap and not very hard to find.
Nah, just BB-8 the thing! That’d be cool. Throw the ball and it’ll come rolling back to you when done :D
This guy also has a cool method for catching pokemon. Although, I think I prefer the pokeball version better. Might help the phone last longer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5quGThvjT4
It’s a shame that the game eventually has the ball curve away from the pokemon even if you throw it perfectly straight, so you’ve got to throw “curveballs” instead.