We're installing the first BluePadel system free of charge at one partner club — hardware, software, and support — in exchange for being part of the build. A 12-month commitment, one court, real players, real matches.
A simple exchange. We need a real court with real players to validate through a full seasonal cycle. You get the system, free, for the duration.
From first email to first scored match in about four weeks. We move fast because the build does — the AI scoring engine, watch apps, and cloud are all already running.
30 minutes on Zoom or in person. You tell us about the club, peak hours, member culture, what would make this a win for you. We walk through the system, the timeline, and the data we'd want to capture.
One visit to look at the candidate court, check camera mount positions, verify power and Wi-Fi, and meet the staff who'll be the day-to-day contacts.
Two to three half-day visits during quiet hours. The two cameras mounted, a small streamer box connected to your network, the cloud session created, and the watch apps verified on a few member devices. Non-invasive — high mounts only, no court surface changes.
First few sessions with a friendly group of members. We tune the detector against your club's lighting and surface, fix any score-engine edge cases that come up, and lock in the configuration.
Any member with a Garmin, Wear OS, or (soon) Apple Watch can run the standalone watch apps. The club becomes the launch site for our marketing — co-branded clips, social posts, case study.
Quarterly reviews, ongoing tuning, new feature drops. At month 12 we agree how to take the relationship forward — either to a paid-for installation or to expand to more courts.
Two small IP cameras mounted high (~3.5–4 m), one behind each end. Non-invasive — no surface changes, no holes in the court itself, and the mounts can be removed cleanly at any point. Cabling runs along the existing fence framing to a small box that streams the footage securely to our South African cloud.
The cameras detect ball trajectories and player positions, not faces. All footage is stored and processed in South Africa, under POPIA. Recorded footage is treated as anonymised training data, and any individual member can opt out — their sessions get excluded from both the training set and the highlight clips. We sign a data-use agreement with the club before any installation begins.
Most modern smartwatches work. Garmin (Fēnix, Forerunner, Venu, Vivoactive — 40+ models), Wear OS (Pixel Watch, Galaxy Watch, TicWatch), and Apple Watch are all targets. The standalone watch apps are R600 a year from each platform's store. Members without a watch can still see the score on the court-side display (and we'll have one up).
Honest answer: the engine has been proven on thousands of test matches and the offline watch app has been in beta with real testers for months. The novel piece — camera detection of wall-aware events — is what the pilot exists to harden. Expect occasional missed scores in the early weeks; the system improves on every match it sees.
After 12 months you have three options: continue on commercial terms, expand to more courts at the same club, or end the partnership and keep using the standalone watch apps. There's no lock-in — the cameras and edge box are removable.
Focus. Validating against one real club, one real surface, and one set of player habits is more useful than scattering installations and learning nothing in depth. The first club helps us build the manual that the next ten will follow.