A Speed Gun That Would Rather Say Nothing: What Building Paceball Taught Me About False Precision
I'm Abdulbasit, 19, from Rawalpindi. For the last month, I've been building Paceball, an Android app that measures how fast a cricket ball is bowled using nothing but a phone video. No radar, no sensors, no hardware. You film a delivery side-on, mark a known length in the frame (usually the two sets of stumps, 20.12 m apart), mark where the ball left the hand and where it bounced, and the app works out the speed from the distance and the frame count.
It's my first mobile app. I'm building it with my partner Mustafa, the lead developer after me, for RevenueCat's Shipaton 2026, and this is the story of the second half, the part where the maths was mostly done and everything else tried to break.
The rule that shaped the whole app
Early on, a real test at the nets went wrong in a quiet way. The...
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