Design and Preliminary Functional Evaluation of an ESP32-Based Interactive Hockey Training Board

Abstract

Interactive hockey training equipment can coordinate visual cues and electronic event recording, but functional integration alone does not establish measurement validity or training effectiveness. This article presents a retrospective engineering account of an ESP32-based interactive hockey training board using a final-year project report as its sole experimental source. Its contribution is the consolidation of dispersed implementation details, identification of discrepancies between documented firmware and performance interpretations, and explicit separation of completed functions from unresolved validation requirements. The prototype combined nine illuminated dribbling targets, three ramp-goal targets, infrared sensors, local controls, a liquid-crystal display, and TCP-based desktop monitoring. Source inspection recovered GPIO assignments, the stated power-supply rating, target-selection and event-counting logic, and difficulty-dependent switching intervals. A companion supplement makes these details and their source locations available while identifying missing specifications. The difficulty-summary dataset comprised 34 repeated sessions involving one participant: 14 easy, 13 medium, and seven hard sessions. Reported mean hits per minute were 44.40, 58.55, and 48.51, with standard deviations of 27.94, 20.93, and 17.40, respectively. These values describe source-reported session variation rather than independently verified device performance. Visual cueing, sensor-triggered events, local interaction, and desktop monitoring were documented qualitatively. Automatic ball return was unsuccessful: controller resets persisted after same-model servo replacement, and the final configuration required manual retrieval. Response-time, accuracy, and fatigue interpretations were excluded because the available documentation did not validate them. No additional experiments or independent measurements were performed. The article improves the transparency of the implementation record without establishing full reproducibility, measurement accuracy, or training benefit. Controlled event-counting, communication and storage tests, complete construction specifications, and documented participant-testing arrangements remain necessary before stronger conclusions can be drawn.