151–160 of 172 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> complicated math Is it though? Isn't the final shape just a paraboloid, like a parabolic antenna with the hoop in the focal point?
It's optimizing for an average of shots from more or less arbitrary locations, so it's not necessarily a perfect parabaloid.
Do the inverse of this and open a stand at a fair :-)
Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things? My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things. And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned s…
YouTube videos are one of the best ways to learn mechanical/material skills. Just start. You'll suck at first. Keep at it and eventually you'll suck a little less. One day you'll be mediocre. And if you keep at it you'll be skilled.
Youtube really shines in this because there is much to see happening. Much of the information is visual and mechanical on how to do things well (or at all).
You generally need lots of tools to build stuff though (you can sometimes trade time for tool cost), but these days finding an equivalent to a maker space or hacker space shouldn't be too difficult.
* ClickSpring's clock series is one of my favorite video series ever.
Wandel is a little unconventional that he builds many of his own tools, but I find he's quite practical and insightful in doing things.
Can someone briefly eli5 how the Monte Carlo simulations feed into learning the optimal surface?
You pick a random position and a random shot (angle, speed), see where it hits the backboard, and then change the angle of the backboard there to direct the ball through the rim after the bounce. Do this enough times, and you have a surface. (I don't know how the number work out, so there are probably points that have multiple values and surfaces with discontinuities. I guess you average the values at a given point a…
In the video he mentioned doing a least squares fit to get the final surface, so that sounds about right.
This was really well explained and interesting. Funnily enough I'm pretty sure this is a really similar method to urinal design, so if this whole basketball thing doesn't work out for ya, you could always work for American Standard...
Similar methods exists for all kinds of engineering problems, like architecture (form follows function), roofs, bridges, city planning, or just the economy. The optimal form is always an optimization problem. Just define the constraints. Maybe the most famous example is Gaudi calculating the form of the roofs of the Sagrada Familia, and then Frei Otto for the Munich Olympics. City planning is easier as their is no gr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. When he measures the ball to move the hoop
Oh right. With a precision caliper no less. Another video posted here the other day used the word thou (as in thousandth of an inch) which is a word I haven’t heard in a long time!