What's the big deal about being powered by raspberry pi

At this point, we are not aware of any other Table tennis robots powered by a computer. We use raspberry pi as it is popular, but our robot will be able to run on other boards like beaglebone too.

You may ask as a player what difference does it make if a microcontroller or a computer runs the robot?

Here are some advantages

• It is easy to add the capability to run on voice commands.
• Do not have any clubs/coach nearby? Add a camera and stream your practice to a coach who can view your training and remotely add drills for you to practice.
• Record yourself playing a drill and watch it later to figure out what mistakes you are doing
• It runs a database. You will have the ability to add analytics in terms of what stroke has been practiced and keep track of it.
• Automatically upload a video to S3 or dropbox for getting feedback.
• If you are a coach in a club, you can set up drills for each player for each session.
• You can use high-level programming languages like Python Javascript etc. You can add any functionality (maybe add a slack bot to let your teammates know you are playing )