The Philadelphia Phillies defeated the L.A. Dodgers 5-1 last night in game 4 of the series. With that victory, the Phillies are now one apponent away from becoming Major League Baseball Champions!

The Phillies and good friends of the show Ryan Howard have been on a mad dash for the title since the allstar break, and I am glad I have been along for the ride! The Hack-a-Bat started out as a plan to provide Ryan Howard more information about his swing, and sparked interest amongst folks out there who also want access to that information as well. In this article, I will recap the concepts behind the bat, and ensure that you have what you need to create your own Hack-a-Bat! My only stipulation is that you must not hack the bat of any active player from the Tampa Bay Rays or Boston Red Sox! ;)

Review

Recall the goal of the Hack-a-Bat project was to perform analysis of a batter's swing by modeling the motion and position of a person's bat. This is accomplished by analyzing the bat's six degrees of freedom, and creating a profile of each swing of the bat. This requires a microelctromechanical systems or MEMS circuit called an Inertia Measurement Unit or IMU. The IMU measures the Roll, Pitch, Yaw, X, Y, and Z which are the 6 degrees of freedom we need to profile our swing.

Communication with the bat

The aformentioned circuit is sealed inside the bat. Now there are two ways we can retrieve that data. We can program our bat's circuit to store the data locally on non-volatile memory. The issue with that is that we would need to remove the circuit after each swing and download the information. This process would become tedious after a few swings. Alternatively, we equipped the bat with a radio, and streamed the serialized IMU data to our computer.

In the DIY article you will find instructions on how to use the MAC version of the software, but many folks have asked about a PC version. Well, in the case of the PC, here is a solution that will allow you to retrieve the Hack-a-Bat Data.

You will need the following:

• PC with Windows 98 or Higher or Linux
• IMU 6 Degrees of Freedom w/ Bluetooth
• Bluetooth Doggle if your PC is not Bluetooth enabled

The IMU circuit listed above comes with software with a nice interface that gives you a visual of each degree of freedom measurement.

The data from the IMU is transcieved via a Bluetooth profile that emulates the serial port on your PC. If you are familiar with the serial protocol, you can code your own interface using Visual Basic, C or C++, Python, PHP, etc. Once you have established communication between the PC and hack-a-bat, reffer back to the previous articles if you want to know how to get speed or the position of the bat.

Well, good luck, and God Speed future hack-a-bat Gurus! May the gravitational force be with you!

Now, enjoy some videos!

Posted by Guru Lloyd | tagged: Ryan Howard, hack, sports, Lloyd