Have you ever dreamed of getting a strike every time at the bowling alley?
Year 12 Beaconhills College student Lachlan Wells has created a remote-controlled bowling ball that will always guarantee him a perfect score.
He built the bowling ball in Systems Engineering, as part of his Unit 3 and 4 VCE studies at the college’s Berwick campus.
Lachlan works part-time at a bowling alley and was inspired by a similar design created by former NASA engineer and American YouTuber Mark Rober.
He said the idea was to create a fun device that would give him a sneaky edge “when in reality the mechanism inside is doing all the work”.
“It will also need to make as little noise as possible to deter suspicions from the public in the bowling centre,” Lachlan said.
He said another challenge was making the bowling ball strong enough to not smash apart once it connected with the pins – and potentially damaging the return mechanism behind the bowling lanes.
The project works by using a pendulum system that has a weight at the base controlled by a servo motor moving the weight inside the ball, making the ball then follow the direction of the weight.
Lachlan controls the ball by via Bluetooth using an app on his phone called Dabble.
The tricky part was ensuring the prototype worked first before risking the ball breaking on its test run.
Fortunately it all went to plan on its maiden run, suggesting that Lachlan might be in for a few ‘lucky’ strikes down at the alley.
