There’s a reason why bowling lanes have bumpers and golf games have mulligans. Whether you’re learning a new game or sport, or have known for years how to play but still stink at it, everyone can use some help chasing that win. You’ve heard of the can’t-miss dart board and no-brick basketball goal. Well, here comes the robot-assisted game for the rest of us: cornhole.
The game itself deceptively simple-looking — just underhand throw a square wrist rest into a hole near the top of a slightly angled box. You even get a point for landing anywhere on the box! Three points if you make it in the cornhole. In practice, the game not that easy, though, especially if you’ve been drinking (and drinking is encouraged). But hey, it’s safer than horseshoes or lawn darts.
[Michael Rechtin] loves the game but isn’t all that great at it, so he built a robotic version that tracks the incoming bag and moves the hole to help catch it. A web cam mounted just behind the hole takes a ton of pictures and analyzes the frames for changes.
The web cam sends the bag positions it sees along with its predictions to an Arduino, which decides how it will move a pair of motors in response. Down in the cornhole there’s a pair of drawer sliders that act as the lid’s x/y gantry.
We love how low-tech this is compared to some of the other ways it could be done, even though it occasionally messes up. That’s okay — it makes the game more interesting that way. We think you should get 2 points if it lands halfway in the hole. Aim past the break to check out the build video.
Seems like there’s a robotic-assisted piece of sporting equipment for everything these days. If cornhole ain’t your thing, how’d you like to take a couple strokes off your golf game?
Thanks for the tip, [Itay]!
When I play this bean bag game with children, I face away from the target and throw the bean bag without looking.
It evens the odds for the kids.
(No, I am not that good of a player even when I face the target, but the kids enjoy my throws.)
With a lot of my throws, the featured board would not help, as it doesn’t have wheels to move the board two to three distances any direction. B^)
+1 for something I identify with!
I wonder… Make a treadmill that could self balance a rolling bowling ball… A bowling alley in a quarter of the space, you can still fast bowl, without destroying your living room.
I wonder… Make a treadmill that could self balance a rolling bowling ball… A bowling alley in a quarter of the space, you can still fast bowl, without destroying your living room.
sounds like a fun project! I’m thinking that the sudden tilt of the threadmill would induce gyroscopic forces on the ball and an overall dynamic that is quite different from the real thing, but hey… I don’t know the first think about bowling
A “square wrist rest”??
Beanbag?
Hmmm, I never thought of using a bean bag as a wrist rest!
I cannot think of this game without thinking of Beavis