[nik12795]

I grew up golfing and I love to make things, so I thought it’d be pretty funny and ridiculous if I made a voice activated golf bag that shoots out your clubs. Like a robotic caddy of sorts.

The video explains some parts of how I built it and shows it off more (I even got to bring it to England to show Rick Shiels, a popular golf YouTuber), but I’ll highlight a few other key points.

- Getting this thing to rotate and finding the right motor took me a lot of time. A bunch of stepper motors I tried initially were too weak and would “skip”. I did some MOI calculations and talked with some engineers (this math was new to me) and I eventually found a motor that was just barely strong enough. I threw a 10:1 gearbox on it to solidify the torque requirements and called it a day.

- The motor didn’t rotate very accurately in terms of degrees. So trying to rotate 30 degrees would actually rotate 30 degrees +- 4 degrees. Over time, there was a lot of drift and rotating a certain number of degrees became completely inaccurate. I came up with a solution where a microswitch was clicked every time a club went by. That way, the motor rotated until a certain number of clicks happened instead of X number of degrees. The video breaks this solution down more.

- The voice assistant software is Rhasspy, an open source offline voice assistant. It had to be offline since I wouldn’t have internet connection on the course. That runs on a raspberry pi and also has the microphone and speaker hooked up to it.

- Originally I was going to use a fancy microphone that has lights and that took up all the pins on the pi, so I planned to use I2C to send commands to an Arduino to control the motor (and solenoid valves which controlled the airflow to the air cylinders that actually shot out the club). I set all that up then changed the microphone at the last minute. If I had more time, I would have removed I2C and just used the Pi. Since I didn’t have time, the current implementation is a Pi and Arduino talking over I2C.

- The video shows how I 3D printed some parts to make the clubs stay aligned in one direction so they don’t smash into each other when they eject from the bag. Just wanted to call out I’m really proud of this solution :)