Instant-replay table football

So, England, nominally the home of football, is out of the European Cup, having lost to Iceland. Iceland is a country with a population of 330,000 hardy Vikings, whose national sport is handball. England’s population is over 53 million. And we invented soccer.

Iceland’s only football pitch is under snow for much of the year, and their part-time manager is a full-time dentist.

I think perhaps England should refocus their sporting efforts on something a little less challenging. Like table football. With a Raspberry Pi on hand, you can even make it feel stadium-like, with automatic goal detection, slow-motion instant replay, score-keeping, tallying for a league of competitors and more. Come on, nation. I feel that we could do quite well with this; and given that it cuts the size of the team down to two people, it’d keep player salaries at a minimum.

This build comes from Stefan Wehner, who has documented it meticulously on GitHub. You’ll find full build instructions and a parts list (which starts with a football table), along with all the code you’ll need.

Well done Iceland, by the way. We’re not bitter or anything.

 

 

10 comments

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Too soon!

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Fun project, anyways.

Do you think?
Well, two BREXIT within a week are hard, so I do understand you.

The Iceland manager are a Swede, Lars Lagerbäck. He and Swedish football managers did learn a lot by Englands manager Roy Hodgson. So it a bit sad that he fell because of someone walking in his steps.
And have always thought that England have to large expectations on Football cups, like EM and VM.

But yes, I can’t imagine how this effects English football fans…

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That’s very nice. Thanks for sharig this Liz and Stefan. It has got to be the next build at Pi Towers. It would sit nicely next to the Retro-Pi arcade machine :-)

Liz Upton

Anybody know where we can get a football table cheap?

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There are open-license plans for one at Opendesk- https://www.opendesk.cc/blog/the-opendesk-foosball-table

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Yet another reason for me to buy a 3D printer… I could print players for the table with all our faces on!

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Would the faces be red? :-) << Imagine in red.

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I guess it depends what combination of size/sturdiness/wobbliness you want ;-)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=table+football

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Ok, this is fun, haven’t played table football in years but now i want to

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Or as us chaps across the pond call it foosball. Or foolsball ;) But those are great instructions and could probably be applied to any table top game like air hockey. How about a flashy game of pool complete with blinking leds.

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