Himanshu Dada
A few months back, one of our engineers brought a simple question to the team: can we count basketball dribbles accurately without strapping anything to the player's hand? The answer turned out to be yes, and the build is a good example of what embedded application development services actually look like in practice — a real problem, a constrained bill of materials, and firmware that has to work on the first try.
This post walks through how we built it, the components we used, and the decisions we made along the way.
The Problem With Counting Dribbles
Dribble counting sounds trivial until you try it. A phone in a pocket picks up footsteps, arm swings, and crowd noise. A wrist wearable works, but players don't want extra gear during training. We wanted something that sits on or near the court — a small device mounted under the hoop or clipped to a pole — that detects the ball hitting the floor and counts each bounce.
That means we're detecting a specific vibration and impact signature, filtering out everything else, and doing it on battery power for weeks.