Pool (Billiards) Assist

The Project

While playing pool with my friends, I noticed that when you hit the ball and it collides with another ball, the game will show you a rough trajectory of where that ball might go. On the other hand, when you aim the white pool ball at the walls, the game won’t show you where the ball might end up. Because of this, I devised a solution to use a servo to find the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection to show where the ball is going to go. I used a Raspberry Pi 3B to be the controller for the project. I also used a hobby-grade 5g servo to show the angle of reflection. All of this is controlled with an app controller that I made with Thunkable, which is a platform to build online apps.

View this project on YouTube

Team Comments

I chose to make this project because I preferred an easier way to calculate the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection while playing pool with my friends. While testing my idea with the servo, I found out that with this system, I could be victorious almost all the time.

Some difficult problems that I had to surmount would be to get the code between the Raspberry Pi and the Thunkable app-based controller to work with each other.

I would like to add a housing to the product and make the design more sleek and low profile.