If you are an American, you’d probably think of [Silas Hansen’s] project as “air soccer” but most people will prefer air football. Either way, it is like air hockey but more of a football field feel. The project looks great — if you saw this on the shelves of the local toy store, you wouldn’t think anything of it. You can see a video of the game in action, below.
Unsurprisingly, the brains of the game are an Arduino. The case looks good thanks to laser cutting and 3D printing. A Roland printer produced the stickers that really dress the case up, but you could find another artistic way to do the decoration.
You could probably pull this off without all the fancy fabrication gear, but hand drilling all those air holes would be a pain. The air is from a 3,000 RPM brushless fan and a pair of line trackers are repurposed to sense when the puck — er, ball — reach the goals. A touch display handles the scorekeeping.
Overall, a great-looking project and one of those things that doesn’t use anything too high-tech, but still looks great and seems to work well.
We’ve seen hockey tables before, of course. If you are too antisocial to have an opponent, you can always build one.
That looks great – I was supposed to see he painted the play field – I was expecting that to be printed in vinyl either way it looks great
Is the air pressure even across all holes? How big a table could a small fan like that handle?
Air Hockey,hence the puck,hosers.
This, we Americans call it “air hockey” because of the puck sliding around. It also usually comes with a white field, not green. I’m rather amused to see it translated to a soccer theme.
It is kind of cute, isn’t it? XD
Thank you, I already had “If you are an American, you’d probably think of [Silas Hansen’s] project as “air soccer” but most people will prefer air football” copied to drop a big wth rant abbout only ever being called air hockey.
As an American, who would bleed on the flag to keep the stripes red…it has only ever been Air Hockey. I hope it was a troll post, not Al that out of touch.
Since when do football/soccer balls bounce off the sidelines?
It’s a beautiful build, but there are reasons why this game is an analogy to hockey, and not other sports… (Yes, I’m aware there are “indoor” variants of the sport that do allow play off the walls.)
Indoor soccer! or fast football. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_soccer