by Exosite, on February 19, 2013
We just put some finishing touches on The Web Leaderboard for our web-enabled Foosball Table - Internet of Things gaming!
Exosite's Foosball Avatars
The foosball table came from Costco and conveniently had goal sensors already built into the table. So, we grabbed an Arduino board & Ethernet shield and wired up goal sensors and Avatar sensors from the table. After adding a few lines of C code to send the raw values up to the cloud, the foosball table was online!
Internet of Things Foosball Table from Exosite on Vimeo.
Internet of Things Foosball Table from Exosite on Vimeo.
Up in the cloud, we used an Exosite Portals free community account to add some lua scripts to process the raw data coming into the One Platform. The raw and post-processed data all gets aggregated under Avatars so each player has a history. This history is then used to create The Leaderboard.
The first version of the The Leaderboard was pretty boring - just some stats like Games Won, and Total Goals, etc... So, we came up with a way to create a Skill Multiplier that is used to weight the result. That, combined with the fact that the Top Player stat is only good for 7 days, ensures that the team pays close attention to their game playing strategy (for better or for worse!).