Using sensors to track sport performance — anyone tried DIY setups?
Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2026 7:57 pm
Hi all, new here. I've been tinkering with some sensor projects lately and wanted to ask if anyone has experience building DIY sport performance trackers.
I play tennis recreationally and I've been curious about measuring things like racket speed, impact force, and spin rate using accelerometers and gyroscopes. The commercial options are either too expensive or don't give you raw data to work with.
I was thinking something like an MPU-6050 or LSM6DSO mounted on the handle, logging to an ESP32 with BLE, then processing the data afterwards. The tricky part seems to be calibrating the sensor orientation and filtering out noise from normal movement vs actual shot data.
Has anyone here worked on something similar? Not necessarily tennis — any sport where you're trying to capture motion data from equipment. I've seen some interesting approaches to this kind of analysis online and it seems like the DIY community could do a lot with relatively cheap components.
Main questions:
- What sampling rate would you recommend for capturing fast movements like a tennis serve?
- Any tips on power management for a small sensor module that needs to last a full match?
- Best approach for timestamping and syncing with video if I want to correlate the data visually?
Cheers!
I play tennis recreationally and I've been curious about measuring things like racket speed, impact force, and spin rate using accelerometers and gyroscopes. The commercial options are either too expensive or don't give you raw data to work with.
I was thinking something like an MPU-6050 or LSM6DSO mounted on the handle, logging to an ESP32 with BLE, then processing the data afterwards. The tricky part seems to be calibrating the sensor orientation and filtering out noise from normal movement vs actual shot data.
Has anyone here worked on something similar? Not necessarily tennis — any sport where you're trying to capture motion data from equipment. I've seen some interesting approaches to this kind of analysis online and it seems like the DIY community could do a lot with relatively cheap components.
Main questions:
- What sampling rate would you recommend for capturing fast movements like a tennis serve?
- Any tips on power management for a small sensor module that needs to last a full match?
- Best approach for timestamping and syncing with video if I want to correlate the data visually?
Cheers!