The ultimate hoop (until the next one...) (Patreon)

I'm hard at work on designing the next iteration of my ultimate basketball hoop for people that can't normally sink shots. The most common comment on my previous hoop was "but what if I miss the hoop har har." That's a good question and I'm planning to answer it with this. It is a hoop that can move BLINDINGLY fast laterally to intercept the ball. It also can tilt to direct line drives into the hoop. 

Interestingly it only needs the one tilt degree of freedom to send things into the hoop since it has the lateral movement. The way I'm thinking about this is that there are three degrees of freedom in the system which is what it takes to control 3 degrees of freedom of the ball... I need to think about this more to get a more formal proof though. 

The challenge with this hoop is that it is very huge (wall sized) but needs to be extremely light so that I can accelerate it as fast as possible. To accomplish this I have used a lot of carbon fiber/fiberglass, light-weighted sheet metal, and most importantly all motors are stationary. This has resulted in a pretty neat belt arrangement that allows me to move the entire hoop laterally and tilt it with stationary motors. It makes the control slightly tricky since all three degrees of freedom are coupled.

I don't want to give tooooo much away but it is coming together nicely. I have 80% of the parts fabricated and hope to get to assembly in the next day or so. I was able to fabricate the parts quickly because they are mostly sheet metal and 3D printed. There are only 2 machined parts which saves a ton of time. 

I'll be posting more on the discord at things unfold. Thanks again for the support everyone!