Oliver Nicolas Cottrell
6th Grade, La Jolla Country Day School
La Jolla, CA
Oliver has always loved hockey, and wanted to be a professional hockey player when he was young. He鈥檚 always looking for new ways to practice his skills. Oliver owns a machine to help him improve his puck handling, but he wanted a machine that would help him practice puck catching and passing. He was sad to find there was no machine to help him. 鈥淚 decided to combine my love of hockey and electronics to help with hockey passing,鈥� he says.
Automatic Hockey Puck-Passer Machine
Project Background
When thinking about how to make a hockey puck passer, 鈥淚 thought of pitching machines for sports like tennis and baseball,鈥� Oliver says. 鈥淚t would be able to randomly fire the pucks at different locations while also having another mode to track the player via camera.鈥� His passing machine is a large cube with a lazy Susan inside, along with a tube to store hockey pucks and two motors to launch them.
But launching pucks in just one direction wouldn鈥檛 be good enough. Oliver also connected a camera to the top of the passing machine and connected the camera and motors with a Raspberry Pi. The tiny computer detects a blue ball on the player鈥檚 helmet and can use that to launch pucks in the player鈥檚 direction. It can also fire randomly, making the player work harder to catch the pass.
Beyond the Project
Oliver obviously plays hockey, but he also enjoys volleyball, soccer and even jiu-jitsu. 鈥淭hese sports allow me to stay in a good state of mind because of the natural enjoyment I get from competition and moving around,鈥� he says. He would now rather be a mechanical engineer than a pro hockey player. 鈥淲hen I first started with electronics it was something magical to me, it gave me the same feeling as when I played with my friends,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he problem solving made it even better.鈥�
