World's First Automatic Strike Bowling Ball

this bowling ball can get you a strike every time because after you Bowl it you simply lean in the direction you want the ball to turn this idea has been on my bucket list for over three years so today I'm gonna tell you how we made it how exactly it works and what happens when you take it bowling but neglect to tell the people you're bowling with about your slide advantage so this trick ball looks and feels like a normal bowling ball and that's because it's made from a real bowling ball step one on this project was to harness my inner Lincoln and Dan to see what's inside an actual bowling ball the first thing we discovered is that they aren't symmetric that means the center of mass isn't at the actual center point of the ball I won't get into the physics here but this is one factor that helps the pros curve the ball as much as they do next I had my buddy mark who owns a machine shop all about the ball using a lathe once that was done we were left with two shells and now I just need you to fill it with some engineering magic and to do that I need to get myself to London with the trusty a four second travel montage [Music] and the reason I need to get to London was because this is James Burton and this is his house well you should know about James aside from the fact that he's a mechanical electrical engineer genius it used to be a toy designer and I have so much respect for toy designers because they have to come up with really clever designs like this guy here where you could see all of this action powered by a single spring so it can remain inexpensive and his super clever designs include this robot you could control using this puppet robot or this real-life Iron Man or Hulkbuster suit or a bunch of really cool baby aches I had a basic idea for the mechanism in the ball and I knew I wanted the guts to be sort of like a bb-8 so I reached out to him and in the spirit of full disclosure it was his expertise that really made this whole thing possible so if you enjoy seeing awesome stuff like this you really need to go check out his videos and subscribe to his channel and so after geeking out in his house for way longer than we should have we put the ball together and headed to a proper British bowling alley for the first official test we started to pretty low speeds just to prove we had things basically correct then we started getting fancy and eventually worked up to hitting some pin and as a cool feeling and the reason I could control the ball by leaning is because I have this little board taped to my back that has an inertial measurement unit on it that can sense the orientation so if I lean left it sends that command back to the ball using radio waves and then the ball has a receiver that gets the signal to turn left and then this Arduino which is the brains of the operation tells a servo motor how much to rotate which then rotates this heavy pendulum to the left and that radically alters the center of gravity and it starts turning that way in response just like if you want to turn on a bike you adjust your center of gravity by leaning into the turn and if I want to bowl or ball I can just click this limit switch and it will ignore all inputs but as soon as I click it again then it will once again steer whichever way I lean and at first we weren't really getting strikes but that's because my technique was wrong hitting the pins dead straight on will tend to leave the corner pins like this to get a perfect strike the ball needs to approach the pins somewhere between three and six degrees from this point and that's because at that angle the ball hits this first pin and the normal force vector takes out all of these pins in the line and then the ball contacts this next pin here and it takes out all of these pins in a line and then the balls momentum takes out the final three Professional Bowlers get their ball teeth the pins at this side angle by curving the ball and you kind of have to do that because if you suck at bowling like me and you can only Bowl the ball straight if you extend that straight line out you would need to pull from the other Lane over but technically that's not allowed and so at that point your mini strategies are either bad CGI or mechanical engineering and we chose the latter once I got the angle right we started blocking in the stripes in addition to testing our ball we got to see the machine they used to oil the lanes and the crazy fascinating machine that clears and resets the pin after every frame but that's a topic for another video and so with everything working perfectly it was time for the final test to see how performed in real life so we arranged to meet some of our family friends at the local bowling alley and at first I tried bowling normally with the controls turned off but it turns out without the aid of mechanical engineering I suck at bowling and nobody likes me so to get my street cred back I put the switch on and explained I actually had Jedi powers and then I use said Jedi powers to steer the ball get some strikes and reclaim my edges [Music] and it didn't take them long to catch on to the secret that rolling strikes was just directly proportional to how much you leaned [Music] [Applause] when people first look at me they'll typically make a snap judgment and think fashion icon and I get it but much like a transformer there's more than meets the eye for example right now I am secretly listening to some dope jams even though I'm not wearing any headphones because these aren't normal sunglasses these are the Botes frames and they sent them to me to try out for the past few months and you should know they supported this video but they didn't give me any specific talking points to say beside you just tell people what you honestly think so this is my dope tech review by far the craziest thing about these is the sensation of hearing really clear audio without anything on or in your ears when you experience it for the first time it just makes you smile if you get the chance trust me that you really just need to try it out for yourself these are sunglasses so they're obviously designed for situations where you're outdoors like a park or just walking around the key is that you can hear your music but you don't have anything directly in or on your ears so you have greater spatial awareness of what's going on around you and when you wear these and walk around you just feel like your life is a cool montage but what's really clever is that the people right next to you can't really hear them at all since it connects via bluetooth as you would expect you can control your music directly from the glasses as well as take calls or use Google assistant or Siri they've got two primary styles with Alto and Rondo and they just recently released a slightly smaller version of Alto which is probably my favorite the lenses are also easily interchangeable if you want to customize it to your style then these aren't going to replace my 700s especially when traveling but they're innovative and they work super well in the situations they're designed for which is why they got really positive reviews from all the actual tech reviewers so thanks to Bose for making a great product and thanks to you for watching [Music]

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 24,655,528

Rating: 4.9317203 out of 5

Keywords: bowling, bowling ball, trick shot, trick shots, nasa, mark rober, dude perfect, Mr. Beast, beast, teamtrees, trees, engineering, last to fall wins $1000000

Id: wM5NHC97JBw

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Fastfireguy]

Perfectly balanced. As all things should be

[u/Fizzster]

They had the pins set up so far ahead, not sure why. I'd assume it's just because they wanted good camera shots of the ball hitting it, but IDK

[u/drunk98]

That's better then the global 900 RC ball, glad I didn't buy one for $1000 when I had the chance.

[u/MotivBowler300]

I’d never miss a corner pin again!

[u/ant1992]

Okay Aimbot!! I’ll 1v1 you! My dad owns Bowlero!

[u/Spritzertog]

That's 4th Street Bowl in San Jose. Sometimes I bowl there during my lunch break.

[u/Fulmersbelly]

That’s really cool. That’s an insane amount of engineering, but showed off such a great result.

Still marveling at the genius of the idea and execution!

[u/EMAW2008]

Did they add back material they removed when they sawed it in half? the ball will no longer be perfectly spherical right?

[u/MEuRaH]

That was really cool. This guy has made some great stuff over the years. I'm a huge fan.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but the pins are obviously fake. They are plastic/lighter-weight pins. The ball is hollowed out, so it doesn't have a ton of weight in it. They needed to use fake pins to make this work fully.

That's why the pins are not in the pinsetter.