--- title: "From the Telstar to the Trionda: Inside the World Cup’s Smartest Ball" url: https://daily.dev/posts/from-the-telstar-to-the-trionda-inside-the-world-cup-s-smartest-ball-nwgnbiu16 source_url: https://www.codemotion.com/magazine/dev-life/stories/from-the-telstar-to-the-trionda-inside-the-world-cups-smartest-ball type: article source: "Codemotion" published: 2026-06-24T14:50:06.283Z updated: 2026-06-25T16:20:03.815Z tags: ["embedded"] reading_time: 12 upvotes: 2 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # From the Telstar to the Trionda: Inside the World Cup’s Smartest Ball **[Codemotion](https://daily.dev/sources/codemotion)** · 12 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The Adidas Trionda, the official ball of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, contains a sophisticated embedded electronics module developed with Kinexon. Inside is an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) combining accelerometers and gyroscopes, plus an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) chip, transmitting position, acceleration, and rotation data at 500 Hz. Engineering challenges include keeping the module imperceptible to players (weight, balance), surviving repeated high-velocity impacts, maintaining stable radio transmission through constant rotation, and running on a sealed rechargeable battery for over 90 minutes. The ball also features only 4 heat-bonded panels — the fewest in World Cup history — which shifts the aerodynamic drag crisis to ~43 km/h, eliminating unpredictable knuckleball behavior. The sensor's primary role in VAR is providing millisecond-precise timestamps of ball contact, enabling accurate synchronisation with camera-based player tracking for Semi-Automated Offside Technology. Future balls may infer biometric data about players indirectly through AI analysis of impact signatures. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Why this year’s World Cup ball may not fly as far](https://daily.dev/posts/why-this-year-s-world-cup-ball-may-not-fly-as-far-kunyzw3jf) · MIT Technology Review · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The AI Architecture Behind FIFA World Cup 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/the-ai-architecture-behind-fifa-world-cup-2026-r6j8grqif) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#embedded](https://daily.dev/tags/embedded) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/from-the-telstar-to-the-trionda-inside-the-world-cup-s-smartest-ball-nwgnbiu16)