Queensland startup Jetson Industries has developed a smart cricket ball that will be manufactured and sold by Australian sports equipment maker Kookaburra and that Jetson hopes will be accepted for use in professional matches. It made its debut in a demonstration at Lords earlier this month.
Jetson founder and CEO Ben Tattersfield told IoTAustralia that he had started developing the for golf balls, but had been knocked back.
“I pitched the idea to one of the big golf companies, but they said, ‘we make all our money selling both to people who lose them,’ so thanks, but no thanks.”
“That left me with a small electronic device that could handle impact and pick up movement data so I did a pivot to find a different application and hit on cricket. I pitched the idea to Kookaburra. They found that quite interesting and we spent two and a bit years refining it.”
“The initial product was designed for grassroots cricket, but Tattersfield said there had been interest shown in the product from cricketers at elite level.
“The big challenge of the elite level is that they hit the ball a lot harder, and bowl a lot quicker,” he said. “We had to redesign the whole product from scratch so it could be used in international grade cricket: handle the impact but not change the ball at all in terms of weight, hardness, bounce, balance. A serious amount of effort went into that.”
Tattersfield said he was confident the product would meet professional cricket standards. “We’ve worked to the Cricket Australia ball standards because they have one of the strictest standards in the market.”
However Tattersfield said the initial focus would be on grassroots cricket. “The benefit of that is it’s going to be really affordable. We’re not quite sure the retail price. It is a Kookaburra product, so that’s up to them, but it won’t be a massive increase above the cost of a normal ball.”
Jetson is also working with Kookaburra and other sports manufacturers to use the technology in other sports.
“We’ve been approached by a number of other sporting companies. There’s some very obvious applications and some really obscure sports you’d never think of, but when you have a look at the player numbers there are some awesome opportunities we’re hoping will come together over the next 12 to 24 months.”
Bluetooth and wireless charging
The ball communicates using bluetooth to bluetooth gateways placed around the edge of the pitch. It has a range of 70 metres and the gateway a range of 140 metres.
“People say bluetooth is really and drops out all the time, but we’ve worked with chip manufacturer Nordic Semiconductors and some other good partners,” Tattersfield said.
The ball comes with a basic app that will show spin and speed, and a web based platform that gives a live ball-by-ball feed.
“On the software side, there’s a lot we can do,” Tattersfield said “The whole system is cloud based. We can use APIs to take the data into other systems, management systems such as TV broadcasters.”
Jetson Industries processes data from the ball in AWS and use AWS IoT infrastructure as a data gateway between the ball and the AWS cloud.
To associate motion of the ball with a particular bowler or batsman, players are given bluetooth dongles and the gateway uses the proximity of the ball to a player to determine who bowled or hit it.
The ball will use a battery that can recharged wirelessly via a cradle that harvests RF energy. “It captures a particular WiFi frequency and translates that into a trickle charge,” Tattersfield said. “A fully charged ball is good for 40 hours of use.”
