A motorized basketball retrieval and return system for concept cafes — where sport meets hospitality, driven by precision automation.
Design an automated basketball handling system that retrieves balls from a catch area, queues them, and returns them to the player — reliably, quietly, and with a form factor appropriate for an upscale hospitality environment.
Full mechanical design of the conveyor, lift, and return mechanism. Motor and drive selection. Enclosure design for hospitality-grade aesthetics. Prototype build and iteration.
Fully functional automated return system integrated into NeoJa's concept cafe installation. System handles continuous operation across multi-hour sessions without intervention.
NeoJa is an entertainment concept that brings basketball into a cafe setting — guests can shoot hoops while they eat and drink, with the experience designed to be social, competitive, and effortless. Effortless is the key word: a ball-return system that requires guests to retrieve their own balls breaks the experience. The machine had to disappear into the background, reliably cycling balls back to the shooter without noise or interruption.
The mechanical design had to solve several problems simultaneously: catching balls from an unpredictable trajectory, channeling them into a single queue, lifting them to return height, and delivering them to the player in a controlled way — all without jamming, all quietly enough to work in a restaurant environment.
We designed a funnel-and-channel collection system that reliably captures balls from the catch zone and guides them onto a conveyor, a vertical lift mechanism with ball-spacing logic to prevent jams in the queue, and a gentle delivery ramp that presents the ball to the player at waist height. The enclosure was designed in close collaboration with the NeoJa team to match the aesthetic of the installation space — clean lines, dark finish, minimal visual noise.
The system runs continuously across multi-hour sessions with a cycle time fast enough to match the shooting pace of any player, without requiring any manual intervention.