Smart Cricket Stumps
Where Every Wicket Shines
Created on 5th September 2025
•
Smart Cricket Stumps
Where Every Wicket Shines
The problem Smart Cricket Stumps solves
In cricket, one of the most decisive events is the disturbance of the bails. Traditional wooden stumps offer no electronic feedback — they rely entirely on the umpire’s eyesight. Under poor lighting conditions, fast deliveries, or quick run-outs, this often leads to delays, errors, or disputed decisions. While professional tournaments now use LED stumps and bails, those systems cost thousands to lakhs of rupees and rely on microcontrollers, wireless links, and complex electronics. This makes them completely inaccessible for grassroots cricket, schools, academies, and community tournaments, where fairness and accurate decisions are just as important. There is a clear gap for a low-cost, simple, and reliable solution.
What People Can Use It For?
Schools & Colleges→ Train young cricketers with clear visual confirmation of stump disturbances.
Coaching Academies → Help players improve by giving them immediate, visible feedback during drills.
Local & Community Tournaments → Add professionalism, reduce umpiring disputes, and enhance the spectator experience.
Grassroots Cricket → Make elite-level technology affordable and accessible to everyone.
Backyard / Friendly Matches→ Bring excitement and clarity to informal cricket games without needing cameras or replays.
How It Makes Existing Tasks Easier & Safer?
Instant Feedback → LEDs light up immediately (within milliseconds) when a bail is removed, eliminating ambiguity for umpires and spectators.
Low Cost (~₹670) → Built entirely from simple components (Simple Digital Logic, Voltage regulator, LED strips) — drastically cheaper than commercial alternatives.
Safe & Reliable → Wiring is arranged to prevent any stump from being permanently tied to ground, avoiding short circuits even if bails bridge stumps.
Simple to Operate → No microcontrollers, no programming, no calibration; just connect a 9 V battery and the system works.
Durable & Scalable → Can be replicated easily for schools and clubs, and can later be scaled up with add-ons like wireless signalling or IoT integration.
Democratizes Smart Cricket → Makes advanced technology available to communities that cannot afford expensive setups, improving fairness and inclusivity in the game.
Challenges we ran into
Building this project was not just about connecting components, it came with a fair share of hustle and learning. One of the biggest challenges was the physical preparation of the stumps. Cutting into hard plastic stumps to embed LED strips was extremely difficult. We had to measure precisely, cut carefully, and make sure the structure remained strong and presentable. It was a slow, hands-on process that demanded patience and effort.
On the electrical side, we faced challenges in designing the bus-style parallel connection for the LED strips. Since all stumps had to light up instantly and uniformly at 5 V, we had to study how to distribute voltage evenly across multiple stumps without creating drops or overloads. This required experimenting and learning about proper parallel wiring, something we had not dealt with in this way before.
Finally, a unique challenge was sticking to our goal of using only a simple digital logic as the core logic. Most references online relied on microcontrollers or transistor driver stages, but we wanted to prove that simple digital logic could do the job reliably. Understanding and testing how to achieve stable switching with just the simple digital logic IC took research, trial, and refinement.
These challenges taught us not only technical lessons but also the importance of patience, resourcefulness, and hands-on problem solving.
“This project is under consideration for intellectual property (patent) protection. Therefore, while the core idea, impact, and working demonstration are presented, certain technical details and design specifics cannot be disclosed in full at this stage. The focus here is to showcase the problem it solves, its feasibility, and its potential impact.”