Internet of Things Foosball - Part 1

[gunnlaugurth_einarsson]

With a long history of playing foosball inside the walls of company I work for we needed something that could take our game to a new level. Over the years there has been a continuous disagreement among the players who was the best and who has the highest winning rate. We wanted this to be sorted out.

Among these disagreements there had been evolving some ideas on what could be done to sort things out and on how we could achieve this. Everyday and every game played the ideas kept stacking up, whether they where simple or crazy .

The company had its own HANA box for an inhouse development. But we where lacking thoughts on how to create a use-case/business case to experiment the power of SAP HANA.

So when we visited SAP Teched in Berlin(2014) we saw the light. There was this "new" concept on how to create big data. We saw it in the Keynote and there where some sessions introducing Internet of Things. And after visiting the Hackers Lounge we were sure that these two, Foosball and HANA, could bring the best of each other.

Now we had the vision, but nothing happened.

We were lacking time. The workload of the developers was well enough in other projects for our customers and we new this could probably take days to implement. We could not remove developers from projects that were billed as that would lower our income. So we had a new headache.

It was then very convenient when we got an email from the Reykjavik University. They where asking companies in Iceland to submit a proposal for a Final Project for undergraduates in BSc in Computer Science. We decided to submit our project: Foosball IoT.

We decided to present this idea with a simple approach.The idea was this:

• Capture the "game" with sensors using a arm based computer( raspberry/arduino ).
• Everything sensed via the sensors should be pushed into HANA because we want as much of data as possible.
• Use the HANA XS platform for the application api.
• Use SAPUI5 as UI.
• The UI should allow players to create a game, follow the score and browse through variety of statistics

Next steps, the implementation and final result in Internet of Things Foosball - Part 2.