This final thesis demonstrates the application of various tool and methods for product design and development, more specifically, the design and development of the baseball pitching machine. The first step was creating a technical questionnaire and defining the goals to determine the direction and limitations of our product development. The next step was to analyze already existing products and patents to aid the defining the technical specification of our product. Using functional decomposition and the morphological matrix, all functions that the product has to possess were covered and were assigned several technical solutions whose combining gives us some concepts. Evaluation of these concept by certain criteria, one concept is chosen to continue to further design evaluation which consists of selecting standard and commercially available components, also calculating and designing of non-standard components. Following the design evaluation, the end product of the baseball pitching machine with its corresponding baseball feeder was defined. The end product can store 24 baseballs, feed a baseball every 8,3 seconds into the baseball pitching machine, shoot it out at maximal speed of 130 km/h and it can simulate pitching techniques used in actual baseball game. The 3D model of the end product and its technical documentation were made in SOLIDWORKS 2020 CAD program.
Filip Plevnjak
2024
Bachelor thesis
