RC Soccer Arena Build

Building an RC Soccer Table
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It was supposed to be a simple and fun project. I just wanted an arena to play RC soccer with my friends. But then I got the idea of automatically tracking goals. I tried a simple sensor, but when a car accidentally drove into the net it would trigger, which led to needing a camera system to track the ball. I had no idea how to make this happen, so I dove into the new @ChatGPT app, which not only helped me to select the right hardware for the job, but also was able to write the code needed to make a fully functioning scoreboard and coordinate it with the inputs from the camera modules.
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I am a mechanical engineer first, but I have more hardware and coding experience than most. Even with that, getting a system like this to work would've required more time, effort and attention than I would be willing to give because this was a fun personal project that could've easily existed without an electronic scoreboard. It definitely did not need an automatic scoring system, so I would've probably called it good enough with a simple timer to track the game time. Having a tool like ChatGPT allowed me to take this project further, and create a much better result. This unlock allows me to dream bigger, and feel more capable of executing ideas that I previously would've ignored.
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#engineering #chatgpt_partner #mechanicalengineering