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My name Lloyd Emelle. I co-host a technology makeover show called My Home 2.0. We have built guitar hero concert stages, secret back caves, even a twittering teddy bear. But this was the proudest moment of my life, check it out. I got to meet one of my heroes MVP slugger Ryan Howard and then I got an idea hack a bat to profile the swing of the top home run hitter in the game. How to hack a bat? The Ryan Howard speed test. To measure the bat speed and track the swing motion here is what you need. This is a hack-a-bat; it is not your ordinary bat. It is 2.0 bat. It has an accelerometer inside of it that measures how fast you swing the bat as well as take X and Y position of your swing throughout the duration of the swing. There is also a gyroscope inside of that sends a digital fingerprint of your batting profile from the bat wirelessly to the computer.
You want to bore out a hole at the end of you bat two and a half inches deep and one and a half inch in diameter. Next we want to assemble our circuit, we are going to use a technique called wire wrapping which is a very efficient way of securing electrical components. We will insulate the connections with hot glue; the micro controller is like a mini computer. It handles the processing of the information received from the accelerometer and gyroscope and sends off to the transceiver which sends it out wirelessly to the computer. Now we are going to connect the micro controller to our IC socket and we will take our foam padding, place it around the anti static bag, take our electrical components and stuff them into the bat and then we insert our battery.
Next we want to cap off the end of our bat and we will seal it up with hot glue and we are ready to swing away. Step 6 present the 2.0 bat to Ryan Howard. So now we will let just swing, but first to swing hack-a-bat. A data visualization software receives the information from the bat and profiles the swing. The blue line is the Y axis of the accelerometer, it peaks sharply due to strong centrifugal forces, the green line measures the swing speed, an elevated green line indicates a faster peak swing speed. The yellow and red lines taken from the gyroscope show how the position of the bat changes during the swing.
When you start your swing you basically want to have it - get from point A to point B while staying through the hitting zone as long as possible, I like to think of it as -- baseball is being a game of opposites. The more relaxed you are, the quicker you will tend to swing and get everything to his own. So basically with the whole science of the swing you want to be relaxed or you just want to try and take it from here to here while keeping your bat head in the zone as long as possible.
See all the tech makeovers at 2.0.com.
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