--- title: Why I Filed a USPTO Provisional Patent Before Writing a... description: A USTA competitive tennis player and engineer describes filing a USPTO provisional patent for PureStrokeAI before building a prototype. The system uses a... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-filed-a-uspto-provisional-patent-before-writing-a-single-line-of-code-f7hjdcrn9 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Why I Filed a USPTO Provisional Patent Before Writing a Single Line of Code | daily.dev og:description: A USTA competitive tennis player and engineer describes filing a USPTO provisional patent for PureStrokeAI before building a prototype. The system uses a... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-filed-a-uspto-provisional-patent-before-writing-a-single-line-of-code-f7hjdcrn9 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/F7HjdCrn9.png og:image:alt: Why I Filed a USPTO Provisional Patent Before Writing a Single Line of Code og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: 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. # Why I Filed a USPTO Provisional Patent Before Writing a Single Line of Code **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 13 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A USTA competitive tennis player and engineer describes filing a USPTO provisional patent for PureStrokeAI before building a prototype. The system uses a dampener-mounted 9-axis IMU sensor to classify tennis stroke quality in real time, going beyond simple shot counting to provide per-stroke feedback on spin class, contact pattern, and swing quality. The ML pipeline includes sliding-window swing segmentation on gyroscope data, a Madgwick filter for sensor fusion, kinematic and spectral feature extraction, and a lightweight 1D-CNN with residual connections producing multi-head outputs for stroke type, spin class, and quality score. The author explains why filing the provisional patent first forced architectural clarity, discusses honest challenges like player variability, lack of labeled IMU training data, and indirect spin estimation, and shares the current pre-prototype status and next steps. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics](https://daily.dev/posts/table-tennis-robot-defeats-some-of-world-s-best-players-why-this-has-major-implications-for-roboti-p6grnd73f) · Robohub · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [With a feel for physics, AI models simulate a wider range of real-world scenarios](https://daily.dev/posts/with-a-feel-for-physics-ai-models-simulate-a-wider-range-of-real-world-scenarios-9qre5tg2n) · MIT News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Peripheral Labs taps into self-driving car sensors to bring sports fans right into the game](https://daily.dev/posts/peripheral-labs-taps-into-self-driving-car-sensors-to-bring-sports-fans-right-into-the-game-lb4kdhshu) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [MIT’s ultrasound wristband tracks every finger movement and lets you control a robot hand in real time](https://daily.dev/posts/mit-s-ultrasound-wristband-tracks-every-finger-movement-and-lets-you-control-a-robot-hand-in-real-ti-hsbdqbuww) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-filed-a-uspto-provisional-patent-before-writing-a-single-line-of-code-f7hjdcrn9) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Why I Filed a USPTO Provisional Patent Before Writing a Single Line of Code","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-filed-a-uspto-provisional-patent-before-writing-a-single-line-of-code-f7hjdcrn9","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-i-filed-a-uspto-provisional-patent-before-writing-a-single-line-of-code-f7hjdcrn9"},"datePublished":"2026-07-23T15:36:39.680Z","dateModified":"2026-07-23T15:38:48.681Z","description":"A USTA competitive tennis player and engineer describes filing a USPTO provisional patent for PureStrokeAI before building a prototype. 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