Sounds like amazing fun. Good luck with it.

Ugh, there is a four lane bowling alley right near me for sale for $100,000 or so. Now I’m further tempted.

Hell yeah brother, this sounds like a fantastic project with a lot of room to dig into fun things with the double extra bonus of other people having fun with the result.  Now you have me shopping for a bowling alley :D

Have you ever written online about your projects? This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. And your suggestion about a webcam makes me think about a problem a client and I had a couple of years ago that was never solved. It would be a completely controlled visual environment, so an ESP-cam just be the ticket if he&#x27;s still interested.

RFID tags in the heels of the bowling shoes, tied to the users account. Implant a reader in a spot by the lane - stomp to play!

This is interesting, i built similar for retail environments, oneoffs for events or windows or whatnot. I&#x27;m sure you could probably get away with a few terrible webcams per lane for ball tracking it&#x27;s pretty much a perfect environment. A totally flat level lit are with very little noise with one circular blob moving through it. Might be an issue if you do the ever popular blacklight lanes night bowl thing, maybe just a switch to look for light blobs instead of dark blobs ;)An NFC system for tap to play should be a pretty straight forward proposition as well on open hardware. Have tags, tie their unalterable ID numbers back to a credit card&#x2F;account and you are good to go. Start it with your regulars, league players if you have them, whatnot. You can also tie that back to league scoring. A few lanes at a time.I&#x27;m excited for you, this is a super fun project with endless sidequests.

This sounds like such an amazing adventure, good luck I&#x27;m sure it will be a huge success!

Nowhere near the OP (UK) but I&#x27;ve noticed a lot of fun-only lanes arent bothering to rent shoes and just let you wear whatever you have.

Isn&#x27;t that included in the lane price? Always has been for me.

We just charge a flat rate with shoes included. We do $5 &#x2F; person or $25 for a whole hour for larger groups. Wanted to take some of the advanced calculus out of the price of bowling, yknow?

How are you handling bowling shoe rental?

Oh man, Id love to find cheap surplus digital signs

Best post in a lonnnng time.  Need any help?  I have some dmx&#x2F;dj experience from my days in digital signage.

That sounds quite hazardous to anyone who happens to be epileptic.

Hopefully you can synch the light flashes to the ball rotation:1: maybe make the ball look like it isn&#x27;t rolling - or even backspinning2: perhaps it could you make the amount of side-spin or other spin more obvious to help learningMaybe hard to read the ball rotation accurately: even if the ball was marked with dots or bands that help?

At least you could display a message that says &quot;this lane is reserved. Open lanes: 6, 7&quot;

Tap to pay probably doesn&#x27;t help with getting people into the alley but probably helps with &#x27;one more game&#x27;.Your beginners have to come for shoes anyway, and the pointer to which lanes to take (you don&#x27;t want them taking a lane at 6:30 that&#x27;s reserved at 7)

UDP rules for this sort of thing. Art-net sounds very similar to OSC¹ and that&#x27;s a good thing.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_Sound_Control" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_Sound_Control</a>

&quot;Don&#x27;t use mic cables&quot;I&#x27;ve used mic cables for 1000+ shows over 20+ years with no issues. I guess most of my runs have been at most 100-200 feet if distance is the issue. Wireless&#x2F;wifi controllers are the only things I&#x27;ve had consistent problems with.

Can affirm Art-net is supereasy to implement indeed. One thing you shouldn&#x27;t skimp on is the DMX controller. I&#x27;ve used DMX to USB controllers in the past, but those have lots of driver issues. The better ones operate over Ethernet and you can just use UDP. I&#x27;ve been using a Showtec box, but i&#x27;m sure there are other alternatives as well.

I&#x27;ll throw out two quick suggestions for you:- DMX kinda sucks but it&#x27;s manageable. Cabling isn&#x27;t cheap, it really wants shielded 120 ohm cable. If you do go that route, don&#x27;t cheap out and use Mic cable or Cat-5, you&#x27;ll be chasing ghosts forever.- However... Art-net is an absolutely brain dead simple protocol that you can run over WiFi or ESP-Now if you don&#x27;t care about it being perfect, or over Ethernet with an ESP32 with an Ethernet PHY or a Teensy or similar. I&#x27;m serious, you can implement it in an afternoon. Lots of COTS lighting controllers can talk Art-net, and you&#x27;ll be amazed at how trivial it is to make a Python script to blast out the appropriate UDP packets.- sACN is the new kid on the block for this stuff though and it&#x27;s a little more complex. Not to shill LLMs... I hadn&#x27;t actually heard of it before, Claude mentioned it and then one-shotted both a server (ESP32-side) and a test client (Python). There were a couple little bugs, but about two hours from never having heard of the protocol to having existing COTS lighting design software talking to it was pretty dope.The other annoy bit with DMX: it&#x27;s 250kbaud RS485, so it&#x27;s not always trivial to just make a USB-serial-RS485 adapter that will actually run at that baud rate. With the Art-net&#x2F;sACN approach, it is trivial to get an ESP32 or similar to run at that baudrate and drive the RS485 DE pin correctly as well.Enjoy!

1. Can we stack two lanes on top of each other, please? Make homemade bunklanes?2. Something about preventing people from rubbing the bowling balls on your precious lanes.3. Laser light shows + Liquor license = Bowling Alley Wine MixerSorry, I got overly excited by your reference. I say that so GD much, at least once a month, for nearly 20 years now haha. SOOO much room for activities!

Right now I&#x27;m working on adding LED + DMX DJ light control - I kinda want to be able to order LED strips to &quot;chase&quot; a ball as it goes down the lane or back up the return. I plan on triggering laser-light shows and such with the DMX controller.Eventually, I want to allow a customer walk up to the lane, tap to pay and start bowling immediately, too. Kiosk-ize bowling alleys, yknow?I&#x27;m pumped. So much room for activities!

Agreed, this put a smile on my face for the day. What a cool thing to do in the specific and also in the more general sense of fighting back against “Bowling Alone” for your community.

Hi,What you accomplished here sounds interesting, both from an entrepreneurial point of view and also from the engineering side.A good, nice, detailed technical write-up of what you achieved here would be very interesting. Maybe a Hackaday.com blog entry, too? Put it on GitHub?Have fun :)

EspNow is really helpful in this kind of network.For those not familiar it uses WiFi packets to send short messages without any WiFi log on.

Excellent approach to an interesting issue... I hope you will share more information about everything around here! And good luck!

Ah, that&#x27;s extremely cool! I&#x27;m enjoying hacking around with ESP32s etc at the moment (maybe it&#x27;s just nice to do something physical that an AI can&#x27;t) and it&#x27;s amazing how mature the hardware ecosystem around them is. I&#x27;d love to hear more, both about the tech and the economics.

Not that I know of! My market research shows something like &lt; 3500 remaining bowling proprietors in the US, down from 12k in the 60&#x27;s. I think the lack of alternatives is just a matter of being super, super niche -and- a legacy industry if I&#x27;m being honest.

You mean the Bowlini and the Pinini families

That&#x27;s strike one from the Bowlero family.

Real question. Did you have any contact with organized crime? Some of the &#x27;territory&#x27; of nothing-type technologies like vending are said to be &#x27;owned&#x27; by certain groups.

No, but he is within driving distance from us!

You this guy?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@yohnmav" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@yohnmav</a>

That is awesome. I worked at a bowling alley as a mechanic in high school (Brunswick A2) and got a sense of how stupid expensive the replacement equipment was. At one point another employee spilled their coffee over the keyboard used to control the score-keeping system, apparently the replacement was something like $400. What fancy proprietary keyboard did you get for that $400? The keyboard cable replaced with a phone plug.

I&#x27;d make all ESP32 controllers the same - same ready-made PCB, plug-in terminals for the controller and screw terminals for inputs and outputs. ESP32-S3 has enough of IO to handle an absurd variety of tasks. You can have at least 40 ESP32s on the same WiFi reporting data within milliseconds of the event and taking commands via HTTP APIs. Firmware updates are easy over WiFi, too. You can probably have the same firmware for all of them with precise logic configured via the HTTP API. Works well for me in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kachurovskiy&#x2F;nanoels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kachurovskiy&#x2F;nanoels</a> - albeit with just 1 ESP32 per machine :)

I think that an overview of how the machinery works and how it interfaces would be interesting.As a side note, I do enjoy the bizarre bowling animations that the screens come up with.

Well, it&#x27;s because those guys knows everything that they&#x27;ll notice the little things you might have missed :)Have fun first !

Is the fouling functionality more complicated than one would assume? From a naive perspective, it seems like it would just be a simple photo-eye sensor

I love it! I actually looked at integrating with scoremore myself, but once I crossed into hardware world, I still couldn&#x27;t get over how much fouling alone cost. $750 &#x2F; unit and they&#x27;re -ancient-.Definitely will post on bowl-tech as well. I&#x27;m just new enough to have a lot of that new-guy anxiety around posting OpenLaneLink there yknow? Those guys know -everything- about this stuff.

That one relay is the only connection between the pinsetting machine and the scoring system.

The pinsetter is either &quot;on&quot; or &quot;off&quot;, there are no other states to manage. Once it&#x27;s on, it runs indefinitely: it sets the pins, clears the alley, resets the remaining pins, and repeats the cycle, all without any external control.On mine, I do have some &quot;feedback info&quot; on which pins are down + a signal to &quot;when&quot; to score points, but this is optional as you can also write your score manually if you have no scoring computer system.

Yeah this $100k system with all its expensive add ons is there to push a single button.

&gt; Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.Your car also starts with a single relay... that drives a solenoid and a motor.

Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.

I’m just going to say I am going to find a way to be the third person in your bookclub. This is so cool!

Hah! I remember playing a couple times in one of those Alf Minibowling machines in Madrid in the early&#x2F;mid nineties... It&#x27;s a string machine, isn&#x27;t it?Kind of funny that factory is in a small town next to Zaragoza...

Lol, nice! It depends on what you mean by &quot;owning a bowling center,&quot; but it looks like there are at least two of us into this :DI bought a really old fully mechanical (and automated!) mini bowling lane. It works without a CPU, except for the score display, which originally used a 1970 Intel D8749H (MCS-48)!Just like yours, the only thing that turns this machine on is a single relay :D
On my model, I also get feedback on the pin status and a &quot;ball received&quot; signal, so I can trigger the scoring.I dumped the firmware and replaced the display PCB with a more recent DIY PCB with an Arduino that speaks a modern, documented protocol. It&#x27;s now compatible with ScoreMore software, and I can do a lot more with it.Here are some pictures and more info on the Bowltech forum (you should post your stuff here too!):* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bowltech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;small-scale-bowling&#x2F;small-scale-bowling-aa&#x2F;1133707-alf-minibowling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bowltech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;small-scale-bowling&#x2F;small-sca...</a>@vik8 on discord if you need :)

It&#x27;s nowadays so easy to create your own custom esp32 thing. I used to control a home battery installation. Used it on a old Landrover defender where we added a complete dash unit with digital gauges. Used it for controlling a Zigbee 12v switch to activate sprinklers in a garden. In combination with Claude one can create an entire setup in a couple days. Before I was sometimes spending a week on the lcd drivers alone.

I only check 4&#x2F;day now. For awhile when RSS&#x2F;Atom was big, I had hundreds - but was inundated with &quot;too much info&quot; and so wouldn&#x27;t check anything for weeks at a time and then it was a slog - never did get into the Google Reader, was a fan of RSSBandit.My dailies continue to be; Antipope (Charlie Stross), Whatever (John Scalzi), Contrapositive Diary (Jeff Duntemann) and the aforementioned jwz...

man I haven&#x27;t thought of that blog for like 20 years. crazy how many old blogs and web comics that I used to check every day that I&#x27;ve mostly forgotten about.

Heh - that&#x27;s where I was going with the &quot;tribulations&quot; aspect of my comment - which is why I like to read honest blogs - those dreams of &quot;someday I might do &#x27;X&#x27;&quot;, only to find someone who has - and then read all the challenges that had&#x2F;have to be overcome.  (which is not to say that hard-work and following a dream&#x2F;passion-project are not worth doing - it&#x27;s just nice to have more understanding of the risks&#x2F;rewards and issues)

That one was perhaps more of a cautionary tale, given the economics.

Heh - do you have a &quot;blog&quot; (ala jwz&#x27;s DNA Lounge)?(This is the kind of retiring from IT tale that I love to read and follow the trials and tribulations of over the years - good luck, thanks for open-sourcing your work!)

I&#x27;m disappointed that the USBC is starting to certify tethered pin setups, though it is fortunately a separate category of competition. The pin action is wildly different.

String setters are on the way. They’re far cheaper to buy and run.Bowlers hate the idea, but bowlers hated synthetic lane surfaces, urethane lane surfaces, and even lacquer surfaces before that. They also loved their old urethane balls, super soft plastic and dodo balls. All those changes went into place against the wishes of the bowlers, but that didn’t matter. Economics wins, every time.String setters are on the way.

It&#x27;s worth noting that playing on string setters vs free-fall setters is quite different. The string alters how the pins move when they are hit. There&#x27;s not really a &quot;one is easier&quot;, it&#x27;s more a different technique.

Unfortunately it is becoming more and more common for US alleys to use the pins with cords systems. Many lanes will actually upgrade to this system and I feel it is a mini tragedy in a way. I am very happy to see this because it gives me hope that there might be alternatives for bowling alleys who are considering the string based systems.

Yeah, I remember seeing both kind of machines. IIRC For the competitive scene string setters were (are?) a no-go but we installed plenty string-setters on holiday parks because they&#x27;re just more economical.I remember some classmates interned working on new &#x2F; different firmware for the machines you&#x27;re talking about though. Fun project for an internship!

Pinsetters scare the everloving fuck out of me.I did a bit of work for a bowling alley 30 years ago. The guy that had just bought it wanted their 1970s computers brought up to the spec of the 1990s ;-) He&#x27;d retired from an incredibly well-paying job offshore so was well and truly familiar with working on large electrical machinery on oil platforms.Day one - before he even turned the main incomer breaker on in his new bowling alley - the very first thing he did was sit everyone down in the dark and silent cafe and explain the idea behind and importance of LOTO. He didn&#x27;t want to see anyone near any of the machinery without it locked out and tagged out, ever, for any reason, not even near it. As I recall the phrase &quot;never work in this industry again&quot; was used several times.

In the US tethered pins with cords aren&#x27;t really a thing, instead most bowling alleys use mechanical pinsetter machines. These machines are large, complex, and expensive (see here for a video on how they work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Iod6uwUGM2E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Iod6uwUGM2E</a> ) which is why he&#x27;s talking about the equipment being 70+ years old- with the revenues most bowling alleys make, it&#x27;s not economical to replace a pinsetter instead of maintaining the current one. This also means that the alley needs to have a mechanic on staff to keep the pinsetter running smoothly.The way the machines detect the pins is still fairly simple. The assembly that puts the pins into place moves down after the ball is thrown, and has sense switches above each pin that detect which pins are still standing.

Back when I was in school I interned at a company installing bowling lanes &#x2F; machines. Even back then it was fairly simple technology, no cameras or speed measurement yet, just some inputs from the machine as to what pin-cords had been pulled out (i.e. what pins fell down) translated to some simple animations. I remember the screens being just a simple VIA motherboard running DOS + their software from a compact flash card.Sounds like a great project to work on given how cheap both hard- and software is becoming. Wishing you all the best!N.b. The forces in the machines can easily break hardware so be sure to move it away from the machine if possible, and otherwise protect it appropriately.

Honestly this sounds amazing for a vlog on YouTube

This is cool! I too was thinking some time back about creating a CCTV for home using a Raspberry Pi 5 to avoid having my data leak over company-controlled data backups for those. But yeah, I guess I should start thinking about it again.

Is that after costs? Are there much costs? I guess repairs, insurance, rates, taxes, power etc.

We&#x27;re holding pretty steady at $3400-ish &#x2F; month on open bowling alone. No leagues yet, no snack bar yet, no beer yet. It&#x27;s not FAANG income by any stretch, but it&#x27;s doing -so- much better than I initially expected!

I’ll second this. I’d probably follow along even though I don’t own an ally.

No, not a Substack, just a regular blog please.

Yeah good god OP please start writing a Substack about this! Engineer who buys a run-down bowling alley and cleverly fixes problems is exactly what the internet needs more of.

Is there a URL I can send people? I would like to show this to an OG in the pro circuit who has been looking to buy an alley and modernize it but is being dissuaded by the exact situation you are describing.We so desperately need more &#x27;third spaces&#x27; and Bowling Alleys are great for this

This is great content. Have you thought about a second income stream by teaching prospective tech business owners on Youtube? It&#x27;s a model ppl are successfully using?

I started bowling in my teens and as a programmer have often wondered about how these things work, and have had a few opportunities to peek under the hood of the machines. Incredible stuff. Thank you for this work, I&#x27;ll point my alleys to your creation when it&#x27;s public.

- A Digital Twin of the facility in 3D?- R3F and Drei for React-based 3D Three.js animations; but it might be best to pre-render at high FPS and encode with ffmpeg- ProjectM, MilkDrop3, limit- TIL about shuffle skating aka jam skating- OpenNext NextJS- Serwist for a PWA so that you can access your stats when not connected- IndexedDb, sqlite-wasm, duckdb-wasm- To run lights, projectors, etc. (with low enough hertz to avoid PSE Photosensitive Epilepsy risk) I have heard about: OSC (BespokeSynth, Resolume,), SMPTE LTC, Resolume projection mapping, mapmapteam&#x2F;mapmap projection mapping,Open Lighting Architecture has a list of 
Ethernet Protocols including OSC, and a list of USB&#x2F;Serial&#x2F;Network devices.HyperHDR does ambient lightning to match displayed video.Sometimes the glare from all of the lights is too much for visually impaired persons and animals FWIU; no varying lights hour might win too.- If the machines are so old that all you need is a relay, there&#x27;s possibly not as much need to model the whole system with TLA+ and check the proof.Could ask the model about an 
&quot;SIL&quot; (Safety Integrity Level) controller or similar for a bowling alley. Rust RTIC and Rust embassy have RTOS features.How to write unit and integration tests for the system without hardware simulators that can randomly fault.- Soft-white backlit multicolor(?) ePaper displays would save energy and cut glare.Most flying insects cannot see red, orange or yellow light;Red preserves night vision. Blue keeps operators awake. Blue and white cause the worst glare. Jet instrument gauges are reddish&#x2F;orange-ish.- UV Blacklight paint, UV LED Black light.Blue light glasses are great for reducing UV blacklight glare.- Best LED projector 2026- Gogs&#x2F;Gitea&#x2F;Forgejo host Issues, repos and can run Actions with nektos&#x2F;act.Cool project. 
Integrate an issue tracker with mobile notifications?

This is awesome, and I&#x27;m really happy that someone is trying this. Recreational spaces are severely lacking in so many places now: while I love digital things, it can&#x27;t fully replace actual group activities in meat space, but I guess it&#x27;s just not as profitable since it doesn&#x27;t scale.I would totally be a patron with my family at your bowling center, and would love to read a blog or something about your journey.

I&#x27;m interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.

Bowlers often like to use their own balls, so it would be more useful to have a system that doesn&#x27;t rely on modifying the ball.

Perhaps with strategic striping on the ball they could also get angular velocity, could come up with some very cool stats. Or if you&#x27;re really having fun, microchip every ball with an accelerometer &#x2F; gyro

Professional techie and amateur bowler here. I am bowling on old-ish lanes, and the stats we have beyond the score is... well, ball speed only and it barely works on half of the lanes only. I doubt that our alley would ever agree to install anything ad-hoc, but I am super interested in finding out more about your build. If you have a blog, or can post photos and some information about your build I would be glad to read more.Good luck with your new business!!! It sounds super exciting, hope everything works out, the roof, the patrons, and all.

I love stories like this. You’re doing more for your community than you even know!

This is awesome! As others noted, it would be cool to have some YT videos about this that might inspire others and promote your project. I&#x27;m sure you have copious free time to do this ;-)

I suspect this is where our AI agents will really come to shine: helping people who might have a technical bend but are not programmers do cool things.

&gt; retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls.I have a friend who has automated an old food production line. Eg peanut butter making, Muslie roasting etc.With no background in programming he got machines hooked up measuring various things - eg peanut butter levels with ultrasound, roast temps, rotation rates.Zero version control and eyebrow raising methods but massive improvement in safety and throughput. Really impressive.

I think you’re absolutely correct.I suspect it is practical to do a small one-time run of maybe a 1000 copies of a purely hardware device and sell them. Of course, that is just kicking the can down the road a bit farther… At least dealing with obsolescence with purely analog parts is simpler…As soon as software appears, things become less ideal. Now the HW and SW become highly specialized to a single vendor’s single family of devices. Plus, bugs and internet connectivity almost ensure a potentially unbounded number of updates or forever broken functionality. Even toolchains fade into obsolescence…Sure, one can redesign for a new microcontroller from a new vendor. Maybe with new RTOS too. Of course, that is almost as much work as the initial design and probably done by someone else at a later date. Yuck!(And I saw this as a software engineer!)Definitely something to be said of the old habit of a simple analog design with schematics fully provided to the end user. This is something probably still needed today, but perhaps commercially challenging, especially with countries like China in play…

I once expected an aftermarket industry to pop-up to hybridize old cars. Old rear-wheel drive manual cars sound easiest.Generator attached to the flywheel instead of the starter motor, and then find some way to squeeze a drive motor by the rear diff (probably more complicated, but surely not impossible). I thought something might pop up once companies like Bosch started making generic e-axles for manufacturers to use.With a small Li-ion battery (and all the usual inverters, etc.), it could work like a manually operated version of the dual-motor Honda hybrid system. Put it into neutral, and whatever energy is in the battery could drive the motor on the rear axle. The engine could automatically kick-in and drive the generator if there&#x27;s not enough in the battery.It would never be as economical as a purpose-built hybrid, but old manual cars are often reasonably economical on the open road, and terrible in city traffic. Targeting only the urban fuel consumption would go a long way towards keeping them useable, with the added bonus of making manual shifting optional in stop-go traffic. Small motors would be enough for city speeds, and with a small battery, it sounds cheap to me at least.I doubt it could ever be a simple kit, but I thought people would have a go.

There is no shame and no business there.We just read a story of someone who didn’t want to pay market price and went DIY.There are companies doing bowling alley equipment and you can pay them for maintenance.Is there a single one of those on F500 list? No and people are running those companies and what OP did … he didn’t want to pay market price.Well yeah those companies are overpriced if you are software engineer who can wire up and program couple of ESPs have own bowling alley and have free time.

yeah feels like you can only target end consumers or hobby business people as any real business would just reinvest capital in equipment that is modern and can compete or get rid of the business if it&#x27;s not worth the $$$

I think I see some parallels with the aftermarket for old cars. Holley&#x27;s entire catalog is &quot;here&#x27;s a thing that&#x27;ll modernize your 1960s engine without replacing the whole damn engine&quot;This kind of thing is a low-volume, low-margin business by nature. It&#x27;s those kinds of businesses that the megalomaniacs of our field tend to ignore. There are people with needs, and money they are willing to exchange for a solution to those needs. But there&#x27;s no path to world domination by selling carburetors (or bowling alley control systems) so those problems never get solved by anyone with the means to do so. It&#x27;s a shame, really.

They didn&#x27;t offer any of the €15k a year to you, did they?

Where are you located? Around 2020 I put together a landslide risk monitoring site that&#x27;s entirely based on stream gauges:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khmpsitka.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khmpsitka.org</a>It&#x27;s an interesting approach that&#x27;s way simpler than relying on soil moisture sensors placed high up on mountainsides. It&#x27;s not as widely applicable as measuring soil moisture directly, but it&#x27;s been running steadily for over 5 years now.

Next you can hook up an abandoned nuke silo, right?

Yup. I live on a river. We flooded catastrophically in 2019, which made me suddenly care about the government’s network of river level meters.Turns out, they abandoned most of them in 2008, as it was the local council who were meant to maintain them, but they couldn’t afford it - a chat with the president revealed they’d been paying €15k a year for each station to maintain it and they’d cost about €100k each.I went and looked at the battered remains. Sounding tube. Ultrasound transducer. Box of 90’s electronics.Anyway, long story short I banged out six of them for them for about €80 a piece - the expensive bits were the batteries and the dinky solar panel. ESP32, ultrasonic transducer, GSM and LoRa (as two are outside of the cell network), haven’t had to touch them in five years and we now know when it’s time to evacuate, rather than wading out in the night while trees sail past us at 60kph.So much stuff like this.

With respect to bowling alleys, for things like professional shows or food safety it&#x27;s a bit more than &quot;nobody got fired for buying IBM&quot;. The stuff&#x27;s gotta be able to survive field conditions and not cost millions of dollars in refunded show tickets or spoiled foods. Manufacturers test and make themselves accountable for this. Cheap, customized modules work until they don&#x27;t, and by then the engineer who put the custom system together in the first place isn&#x27;t there to fix them. Who would you call when some quick-and-dirty integration code that was burned into these embedded modules without ever being put in a source versioning system fails in some weird edge condition? OP is an SRE, it&#x27;s ok for him, but the average farmer or show operator doesn&#x27;t have the skill.

&gt; There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.I&#x27;d leave out the &quot;old&quot; there.An example: Friends work(ed) as engineers in theaters and music-venues. The costs for (DMX) equipment is insane. Some lamps, rigs or controllers are so expensive that shows only rent them. While there&#x27;s lots of cases where you don&#x27;t want to cut costs¹, quite often a cheap variant cuts it just fine. So apparently there&#x27;s a lot of Pie&#x27;s, Arduinos, ESP32s and old androids used to handle stuff. Custom, hacked, duckt-taped solutions. All of them are certain a startup offering generic but cheap modules that engineers can customize, would be an instant hit. Especially if &quot;service&quot; can be bought with it.Or a friend who installs (climate) control systems in (food)factories, who cludges together arduino&#x27;s and some hacky web-interfaces, who is certain that the industry would love some &quot;off the shelve&quot; solutions that installers can build their own hardware- and user-interfaces on is a very much wanted product. The industry (in EU) is according to him, one built on &quot;lock ins&quot;, where a factory starts off with AcmeInc controllers and then slowly Acme will start charging almost &quot;extortion-fee&quot; alike figures just to fix stuff on a sunday night.Or, a friend who has a fruit farm with lot&#x27;s of freezer-storage (running hundreds of KWs), whith whom I cludged together some Arduino&#x27;s and home-automation to control the freezers to run when electricity is cheap or free. Stuff like this is available for consumers at reasonable prices, but the moment the Amperages go to industry-level, the costs explode. Where a simple remote controllable power-switch can cost €1000s. I&#x27;m certain that there&#x27;s hundreds of thousands of small warehouses, supermarkets, traders, logistics that could save a few hundreds to thousands of €&#x27;s a year, by controlling their freezers, heaters, pumps, pressurizers, dryers and whatnots smarter with &quot;turn key&quot; modules built from generic low cost hardware.--¹ relevant: There&#x27;s a lot of &quot;Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM&quot; behind it: if you go for the cheap €800 chinese knock-off and mid-show something starts failing, its your fault. But if that €10.000 controller starts failing, it&#x27;s no-ones fault.

&gt; Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I&#x27;ve been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.At my shooting range, where security is very important, we&#x27;re replacing the old antiquated &quot;fire stop&quot; (when everybody on &quot;shared&quot; lanes has to stop shooting for there&#x27;s at least one person going to change the targets) system with a modern system of electro-magnets and embedded devices. Mechanical safeguards where, by default, the 10 lanes (there two times 10 lanes, the 50 meters ones and the 100 meters ones) have to stop shooting and then an embedded system with a little controller for each lane that needs to be working to give the greenlight &#x2F; &quot;fire frei&quot; (&quot;free to shoot&quot;).We mostly decided on the switch after a failure of the old system: the &quot;free to shoot&quot; system has recently been given even though there was still one person outside, changing the targets (nothing bad happened but this is a serious incident).We asked for quotes for a system that is always &quot;door locked&quot; &#x2F; red light &#x2F; &quot;fire stop&quot;, unless everything works fine and every lane gives the greenlight (each shooter has now one badge).Same thing as in TFA: cost in hardware is minimal compared to the quoted prices. Like basically 1&#x2F;50th of the quoted price.

I&#x27;m going to forget some details, but he was not using hobby level CNC products. I still have a Kollmorgen AKD motion controller that he sent me as a test bench. Most of the old tools were using 0-10V sawtooth analog outputs for motor position and, IIRC, their preferred controllers didn&#x27;t support that. The initial version of the box I made took that 0-10V and pretended to be a resolver so the AKD could control the motor.Like I said, I don&#x27;t remember all his design decisions, but they wanted to retain the original position sensors.

I do retrofits and I&#x27;ll just assume the equipment he was using didn&#x27;t have an analog encoder option or was ignorant of such equipment (likely using some cheap hobby level CNC thing.) I&#x27;ve worked with a few motion control systems such as ACS and Aerotech and they provide inputs for just about every encoder type imaginable. I retrofitted a CNC with 1500W 90V servo motors with analog resolvers using an Aerotech system, zero mechanical upgrades.

&gt; but they tend to be one-offs that aren&#x27;t worth the timeFriend of mine used to retrofit CNC machines. He&#x27;s left the business, because the machines that can be serviced moved to poor countries - where customers tend not to pay him at all. The modern influx of CNC have some &quot;intellectual property&quot; protection and cannot be serviced.

Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I&#x27;ve been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these systems working with newer controls, they had to make time-consuming modifications to the old machines, in some cases modifying the axis motors and that cost added up quickly. The engineer realized that it was theoretically possible to take the old analog position signals and convert them into something a modern motion controller could read. That converter box would make the retrofit pretty much plug &amp; play, but he didn&#x27;t have the programming expertise to make it happen.We probably built the first iteration of the converter for under $50 in parts and less than 50 hours of development time. That had me searching for other similar opportunities. I have found a few, but they tend to be one-offs that aren&#x27;t worth the time unless you&#x27;re already building something similar. Either that or my ability to see opportunity sucks!

actually, maybe yes for some people, it&#x27;s been so common to have computer tracking forever

Growing up, never saw automatic scoring. Keeping score on paper was just part of going bowling. They had an overhead projector at each lane so everyone could see the score sheet.

Oh yeah. We even have one lane pair the auto-scoring isn&#x27;t working, we just can&#x27;t assign most people to either lane. The machines themselves work fine, and we do have a way to bypass the failed unit - but for the generations that have never seen paper scoring, you&#x27;d think had asked them to file their taxes for fun.

Not that it necessarily justifies the difficulty in making it work (which I just learned about, thanks OP!), but I absolutely adore the silly animations that play after you bowl. It&#x27;s seriously make or break for me. I can live without beer and snacks, but it just isn&#x27;t the same without the goofy animations.

This! I took “rec games” as one of my PE classes in high school. This involved bowling, among other things. A highlight of this was the time I bowled a 24…However, as the class nerd, I knew how to score a game. My parents used to take us as kids. And fortunately, that was on the test. :-)

In high school, I was invited every time even tangential friends wanted to go bowling because I was the only person who knew how to keep score on paper (the nearby lanes didn’t have electronic scoring). And that was over 30 years ago.

Serious and maybe stupid question, also note I don&#x27;t live in the US. Is this really needed? If you put a scoring pad and a couple pencils in each lane would your customers say &quot;what is this shit&quot;, turn around and walk out?

That hasn&#x27;t been the case for at least 20 years. And I&#x27;m being generous.

All this tech is now off the shelf commodity items that anyone with basic skills can put together. For decades this tech was crazy expensive and required assembler machine language programming.

Good project! I&#x27;ve been tinkering with something similar for pinball, arcade, and other coin-operated machines. Lock-in for hardware and software there is a real bummer, but managing payments and security is worth the cost.

Your project reminded me of this recent Texas Monthly article about nine-pin bowling alleys [0]. Your upgrades could help them draw in new customers.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texasmonthly.com&#x2F;being-texan&#x2F;ninepin-bowling-endures-in-san-antonio-area&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texasmonthly.com&#x2F;being-texan&#x2F;ninepin-bowling-end...</a>I grew up in central Texas and bowling was a big family event. Dad was a frequent bowler, bowling in local leagues and travelling the pro-am circuit later. He debated going pro and ultimately, due to a job relocation, stopped bowling. Us kids were active in leagues for younger bowlers. We used to spend quite a bit of time at the bowling alley playing pinball or shooting pool (no video games back then). In those days, a bowling alley offered food and drinks so that you could take the whole family and spend day there without having to go anywhere else for anything. That may be the norm today too. I haven&#x27;t bowled in about 6 years though.Best of luck to you! I love bowling. It is a skills game that is easy to learn and requires discipline to master.

Hey! Thank you for posting. This a great project and an excellent illustration of progress in technology: commodity hardware and open source software got good enough that you could do this at such low cost and as a solo developer. Great work!

Any plans to let people create  accounts to track their scores over time?

Not op, but, because I’m not a designer, I’d probably try to use an AI tool and maybe give it specific instructions to make it suck a little. Then again, not being a designer, I’d probably make it suck too, but it would take forever.

&gt; Any React dev can build their own UI and bowling animations.About that: do you have any questionable quality animations for strikes etc.? To me it was always a major part of the whole experience.

Even setting up camera, lights - etc. goes in the way of doing things. Then someone would have to narrate it, and so on.

Unless you have a stay at home spouse or teenage child who wants a video editing hobby it&#x27;s usually just a huge time sink.

Have you thought about starting a youtube channel? I would love to hear more about the tech and the business.

I highly recommend you start a YouTube channel and document all this. It sounds like gold and would be really interesting.

I&#x27;ve been dreaming of owning an alley

Excited to see the open sourcing of OpenLaneLink!

While reading all about cameras and other sensor I would try to use distance-driven sensors every where. Standing pin vs laying one have enough height difference to not mislead even simple distance echo-based sensor. Other techs I see more reliable are LIDARs, because they don&#x27;t require lighting. Pure camera should have enough light to see the pins (or you have to do some IR based markings and IR camera) or you can&#x27;t make the space darker for events etc.

Believe it or not, cameras are exactly how the existing system works. I can do it now with OpenCV, but I&#x27;ve thought about looking into doing the same thing with mmwave radar instead. I think the radar route is more data-rich, but obviously more complicated and expensive. In the meantime, openCV + a webcam pointed at the pins, then we do some really basic object detection to detect pinfall.

I’m curious what sensors you’re using? My first thought was a camera up above the pins pointing down that can detect them. There are probably more reliable methods. If it were me, I’d seek to simplify as much as possible so things keep running smoothly.

75x markup and the entire moat was &quot;what if your customers know what an ESP32 is.&quot; turns out one of them wanted Tron-themed laser shows bad enough to learn soldering.

I was hoping someone would post Corridor&#x27;s animations.  What better for a custom rig!  ...at least when playing with friends.

Also came here specifically to make sure this was posted. I&#x27;d pay good money to go to a bowling alley like this with friends.

Really interesting stuff! If you&#x27;re looking for bowling animations I&#x27;d look into <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ZXpETSoNWxY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ZXpETSoNWxY</a>Made me laugh.

Oh nice. I&#x27;m a hacker, finally I will be able to win at bowling for the first time in my life!

I had to read this twice because at first I thought it said that you replaced a $120 bowling system with $1600 in ESP32s and I was like &quot;So you replaced a good-cost system with something more expensive why again?&quot; :D

Did you use any AI to help you build this? If so, thats cool but if not, you are even cooler.This is the dream. Imagine cutting out the fat with open hardware, experienced devs (assisted with AI) can rapidly learn and build systems and cut the overall cost of keeping a service running.This translates into savings for customers and could mean the difference between wage stagnated customers being able to enjoy that service or not. It can also mean the difference between a service being able to survive in a lower density area vs closing.That bloat from a vendor is eventually passed down to the customers. And to be frank, so many vendors do the bare minimum and get worse over time.I observe when people buy out an old place like an arcade, house or some other venue, rip out all the old to replace with substandard &quot;modern&quot; design that might be modern taste but just of poor quality(real wood, screen printing, high quality professional displays vs particle board, cheap LCDs, etc.). All of that poor quality is some vendors additional padded margin.So many &quot;reformed&quot; businesses are just some joker&#x27;s passive income investment portfolio because they have to put all the money they have to use somewhere and they wont spend a single ounce of energy more than they have to. That means buying substandard junk from a vendor at whatever the vendor charges, passing the cost to customers and they have to just take it.Luckily with this declining K-Shaped economy more people are just deciding not to participate. Maybe that will put some fear into people who operate business like this.Will this be the very best bowling system ever invented? Maybe not but the cost savings might make it much more valuable because it allows more to enjoy the service.An average system thats low cost is better than an average system that you got to pay out the nose for. And the openness makes it possible that it could eventually become so much better than any vendor could possibly deliver.Maybe im totally wrong about this and the existing players in the &#x27;bowling machine&#x27; space are stellar...but I have my doubts given what I&#x27;ve seen elsewhere.

I&#x27;m a bowling fan and seeing this makes me happy. If I can help or you put something together for others to contribute, please reach out.

There&#x27;s a scene where Jack Klugman&#x27;s character is staying in a hotel in Buffalo and he leans out the window and he looks up and down the street and he says I never knew that one street could support eight bowling alleys

Nice, sounds like a lot of fun. A few years from now one may have 2 businesses, as solving the niche issues is how small business happens.  =3

Re-reading it, I guess I can see the AI bits... But at least the concept is novel.It didn&#x27;t scream AI generated to me.

My original, handwritten post was 5600 characters. I used claude to truncate it down to the 4k limit. I assure you though, I had initially gone off on an extremely detailed diatribe about it.

Amazing post. I&#x27;m a enthusiastic bowler myself and in tech so this scratches both of those itches. These are the types of posts that keep me coming back to HN.Best of luck and please post some images&#x2F;videos of the prototypes in action.

&gt; Sure, bowling equipment is niche, but the open hardware and software landscape is amazingAbsolutely. This is what makes open source extremely powerful - ability to take absurdly small niches no big tech company is willing to fill.

Was looking for this comment.While I&#x27;m not really defending the markup of the commercial system, you&#x27;re not so much paying for the system as you are paying to have someone to call when it breaks, ready spares inventory that can be overnighted, etc).

Short repairs are always nice, but I&#x27;m curious about the frequency. You&#x27;re your own repairman, but that won&#x27;t be true for all owners. So it&#x27;s not if the repair takes 5 minutes, it&#x27;s how long the lanes are down any time there&#x27;s a problem.I wonder what sort of things you could do to harden the system. From potting to overbuilding to redundancy.

Indeed, and it&#x27;s filled with top-level filler comments unfortunately.

I nominate this post as an archetypal example of content that belongs on the Hacker News site.Thank you for sharing; I&#x27;m so glad for you that it worked out.

That&#x27;s awesome.That said, didn&#x27;t you just shift the cost instead of reducing the cost?It&#x27;s of course subjective, and the goal of the question isn&#x27;t to devalue your work, au contraire, I&#x27;m saying that you contributed 120k worth of value.This is as-is a product that you can sell to other bowling alleys, and do not fall into the trick of selling savings and pricing it at like 20k. Your product may be better as it can be customized, modernized, it has a single author and less bureocracy than a corporate 30yo bundle that was handed over through 5 generations of programmers after resignations and layoffs.Good luck

Take a look at adafruit and sparkfunYou can find kits that have a selection of sensors - enough to get started and experiment<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;193" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;193</a>

I&#x27;d go with a more reputable vendor unless you&#x27;re on a really tight budget because Aliexpress isn&#x27;t even that cheap, all things considered. There are fake chips and really low quality parts out there that will waste your time.You can get a range of ESP32 boards from Digikey for $5-$8 and you&#x27;d have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get them much cheaper than that on Aliexpress.

Aliexpress is king for cheap IoT modules&#x2F;accessories<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;wholesale-esp32-s3.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;wholesale-esp32-s3.html</a>

If you have a nearby hackerspace or similar, check it out.Likely they will be able to help you choose and guide you.For me the hurdle was less about finding equipment and more being able to learn from experienced people.

I want to start working with arduino&#x2F;raspberry pi&#x2F;esp32&#x2F;sensors.What would be a good source to buy these in bulk (along with accessory components. e.g. wires etc.)?

With the dark patterns and lock in of LaneTalk I&#x27;m wondering if you plan at all to provide scorings to end users at all. Been getting sick of lane talk. I&#x27;m also wondering if you have any idea how LaneTalk gets their data and if it&#x27;s possible to go to the source.

Much love and respect. Nerd on and may the strikes be with you.

Bowling by itself isn&#x27;t coming back, but bowling with other entertainment activities has been trending for a few years now. These lanes are usually low(er)-maintenance string lanes.

It&#x27;s hard to tell if it&#x27;s making a comeback but it&#x27;s getting attention.Ben stiller produced a documentary for HBO &quot;Born to Bowl&quot; and it was very engaging. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Born_to_Bowl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Born_to_Bowl</a>

yeah, even gas stations mostly make their money off of other stuff. if anything it&#x27;s a little weird for a business to make their money off their primary business model.

&gt; Most of the operating profit back then came from alcohol sales and that&#x27;s a totally different business.I think this is typical of a lot of similar-ish businesses. Restaurants, bowling alleys, movie theaters, all run on high margin alcohol (or concessions) and make very little profit on the primary business.

I grew up behind the bowling machines. My dad was a bowling machine mechanic and worked on machines all around the midwest. He often moon-lite as the on-duty mechanic during league nights and I&#x27;d go with him.Mostly he worked at the local 16-lane alley with ancient AMF machines. The logic was all relays in a &quot;chassis&quot; on each machine. Relays would fail, pins and balls would end up where they&#x27;re not supposed to be, folks would roll the ball into the sweep. All kinds of stuff. As a kid was was fantastic to see. A pinsetter machine is a real Rube Goldberg type contraption. Probably lead me to being an engineer.We had the several opportunities to buy a small-town bowling center, but looking at the economics -- even back in the 1980&#x27;s -- wasn&#x27;t good. Most of the operating profit back then came from alcohol sales and that&#x27;s a totally different business.Good luck! Recently Facebook has been showing me a lot of bowling content. Be cool if it&#x27;s making a comeback.

I would love to watch YouTube videos on your work!

Once I had more than a few esp32 sensors about the place, with my own firmware, I got serious about getting the OTA updates working and a good c++ wrapper around the nvram management. I don&#x27;t like the vibe of multiple sensors not having the fixed firmware, just OCD. Github mianos.

Do you know how often is the score keeping system replaced or requires repairs?You could potentially have a decent side gig replacing scoring systems for a fraction of others

There is only one thing left to do. Get an old copy of Lightwave from the 90&#x27;s and make more of those bizarre strike animations.

I’d love to see a schematic.I’d highly recommend to make sure you have plenty of esd diodes and protection resistors on all inputs. That’ll help the longevity of the system.

Where is this thing? Would like to visit!

I live in the Boston area and there is a candlepin bowling place called Needham Bowlaway where the owner has done something similar. He automated the scoring system since nobody from outside New England really knows how to score it and it works really well. I believe he used some basic java code to detect whether the pixels at certain areas are white (pin) or not (no pin). He&#x27;s always working on developing a video game every time I&#x27;m there although he may have finished by now. Maybe there&#x27;s more overlap between bowling centers and software engineers than OP thinks.

Awesome SRE approach to a physical legacy problem, looking forward to the GitHub repo

Yes it can take an arm off. But that is not the bit that is being controlled by him.  The machine starts with a single relay...he fires the relay and keeps score

It can, yeah. For that reason, I only allow myself or Brunswick-certified mechanics to touch our pinsetters. We run old Brunswick A2s that were built in an era where &#x27;safety&#x27; was practically a bad word, y&#x27;know? These machines are extremely hazardous if you aren&#x27;t careful, for sure.The good news is that electrically speaking, it&#x27;s an incredibly dumb beast. You&#x27;ve got power on&#x2F;off and the &#x27;cycle&#x27; action. There are five safety interlocks through the power on&#x2F;off path - one on the back of the machine, one on the front, deck jam, turret jam, and front desk. I&#x27;m not touching that path -at all-. If the machine&#x27;s on, consider it dangerous.The safety procedure for working on these is - Switch off mechanic interlock switch, switch off the machine main circuit breaker, disconnect main power, begin work.Most insurance companies hear &#x27;bowling alley&#x27; and immediately reject you... had to scramble to find a local insurance company that would carry us.

I am compelled to ask: Can this equipment take someone’s arm off? Do you have insurance for that? Does you insurance know you wrote this yourself?

this post is such a breathe of fresh air (real &quot;hacker&quot; stuff). thank you for posting

I&#x27;m in the midwaste. Love to know where you bowling alley is!

Thank you for sharing. This type of stuff gets me pumped up. It just shows that tech improvements usually 10x - or in this case 1000x - some old metric. In this case its cost. I think the same sort of rule of thumb applies to things like speed, features, user experience, etc... Getting this type of cost advantage eventually translates to a better UX, as you&#x27;ve alluded to.  Way to go.

Yes but the alley was closed.  They couldn&#x27;t pay the company anyway. The big providers will still pay the company,  because they want support.

I know this is rationally a good thing to do, but I can&#x27;t help but be sad imagining this bowling equipment company being run out of business because someone wanted to do their jobs but for free. It&#x27;s kind of absurd from their pov. Like imagine you own a cafe you&#x27;ve worked hard to grow into a successful business, and then next door some guy opens a cafe with infinite free coffee just because he is a generous guy.

This is all extremely interesting.Lanes have been switching to Brunswick all-in-one string pinsetter&#x2F;scoring systems due to, in large part, operational cost and lack of options. (Many bowling alleys still rock A-2s or GSX pinsetters whose part costs are sky-high due to not being in production anymore). The ones that are trying to not become Bowleros or Punchbowl Social type establishments might be interested in this!Have you posted this to &#x2F;r&#x2F;bowling yet?

&gt;&gt; Thanks for reading! Let me know if anyone&#x27;s interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.I’d say, “yes!” judging from the upvotes.

I&#x27;ve always wondered about these when I see bars in tiny towns in rural parts of WA, OR, ID because the only way to get home is to drive drunk (I seriously doubt that the locals are organizing designated drivers for carloads of intoxicated people, and no taxi services exist). It seems they just take a gamble on not crashing and not getting caught by the local law enforcement.

Having grown up in a small midwest town in an R&amp;R desert, I think the canonical answer is a liquor license.

&gt; On a topic not exactly related to the implementation of the ESP32 and hardware, what other R&amp;R activities can one add to a bowling alley to make such a facility more popular and attractive for the locals?Pinball seems to be having a bit of a renaissance in some areas

&gt; My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren&#x27;t many recreation options for families. You&#x27;ve heard of a food desert? This is an R&amp;R desert.On a topic not exactly related to the implementation of the ESP32 and hardware, what other R&amp;R activities can one add to a bowling alley to make such a facility more popular and attractive for the locals? It would be very interesting to see some photos of your facility and what you&#x27;ve done with it since you bought it.

With a materials to retail cost multiplier of x10 (which is on the low side), your system wouldn&#x27;t be cheaper than the commercial one unless you can build and install it yourself. I doubt most centres would have the skills available to do this.Nonetheless, you&#x27;ve done a fantastic job here.

Really cool. This reminds me of escape rooms. Since they&#x27;re a newer thing, a lot of them rely on modern low-cost DIY stuff like this.

$120k for a customized system that&#x27;s central to your entire business doesn&#x27;t sound that expensive really. Can you make your own? Sure, but the devil&#x27;s in the details. Complex systems are always more difficult to make reliable than you think. If it&#x27;s down and you&#x27;re losing business, who do you call? Yourself. Besides being a bowling alley owner, now you&#x27;re a tech startup entrepreneur with one customer. It might end up fine, or you might end up with a whole new set of headaches.

show it running doom and I&#x27;m on board

The substance of what you wrote is interesting on its own, but I wanted to compliment you on your writing style. It was an enjoyable read.

When you say drain too much time, you mean due to it being a distraction? Then I would try to optimise it so that it&#x27;s playing the slow-mo immediately, and maybe at 50% speed so that the 3 second buffer is played out in just 6 seconds.If you wanted to be REALLY clever, you could get it to start playing the slow mo the moment the ball is detected.Or perhaps replays could be gated behind a button push. Ball detection copies the current video buffer into an secondary buffer; the button plays whatever is in the secondary buffer.Or you could make it a web app, and stream replays to people&#x27;s phones when they&#x27;re on the alley&#x27;s wi-fi. That has the benefit of making an epic moment saveable and shareable.

The instances that I&#x27;d want a replay are more likely to be when I &#x2F;don&#x27;t&#x2F; strike – I want to review the ball&#x27;s motion through the pins and off the deck on unsuccessful shots so I could understand how to adjust my next fresh rack delivery.

Probably better to enable it only for strikes&#x2F;spares as it would drain too much time, but the idea is great.

One thing I&#x27;ve always wanted at a bowling alley is an instant slow-motion video replay of the pins being knocked down. Seems easy to do in theory, a Raspberry Pi + compatible camera could do this very easily, so long as you could mount it in a good locaiton. The only alley integration needed would be to tie into whatever sensor detects when the ball reaches the end of the lane.* Mount a 60 fps camera pointed at the pins.* Continuously record a short looping buffer in memory (5 seconds would be more than enough).* When the ball-trigger fires, wait an extra second, then freeze the buffer and play the buffer once at normal speed, then again at 1&#x2F;4 speed.* Finally, restart the recording loop.If it&#x27;s a dark alley, you could use a low-light camera such as an Arducam with the STARVIS IMX462 (no IR-cut) and if ambient light is still too low, add a few infrared floodlights. Having instant slow-mo every time the ball hits would be a crowd pleaser, especially with kids and casual venues. If one of my nearby alleys had this, I wouldn&#x27;t go to any other alley.

Wow, this sounds super amazing! If you find the time to take some pictures or put it in a blog post, that would be amazing :)

Did you consider using canbus? esp32s can handle canbus, and it would simplify the topology.

Awesome work! I would love to see this documented or at least a video of how everything works, not just to see the electronic setup, but to get a look at the mechanical internals of a 70 year old bowling machine.

Vendor lock-in wouldn&#x27;t be a problem if successful businesses didn&#x27;t become lazy, greedy, and dishonest. But somehow...

When you&#x27;re up and running you should put up a display of some photos and explanatory text about the system. Might get some local kids interested in engineering.

This looks amazing! Wishing you the very best for your success.

Why ESP-NOW and not ESP-WIFI-MESH (that has routing, self status, retries, etc. builtin)?

I’m living in an R&amp;R desert myself, with some nice big abandoned shops, and have always wondered about the economics of building something. It amazes me how expensive a bowling alley actually is. Fantastic work in getting your costs way down, and doing something so genuinely useful for a wider audience. Hopefully other small bowling alleys will find this and try it out

Wait. You didn&#x27;t do all that without AI?

Great project! As I like playing with ESP8266&#x2F;ESP32 boards myself, I would enjoy reading more about your bowling adventure.

Cool project! Get a blog and post there, please! Photos, media, anything, is very welcome! One of the most interesting things I’ve read here in a very long time. Don’t let it be wasted to just lie here, for the very narrow audience.

I would love to see some blog posts and&#x2F;or videos about this!

You can buy farm land for that price yes. But you can&#x27;t build on it

You can buy land in Northern England or Wales at £10k per acre. Even a large bowling centre wouldn&#x27;t need more than a few acres.But you&#x27;re right in general. Looks like this former bowling centre in Inverness is asking for £1.5m: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.businessesforsale.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;for-sale-leisure-development-opportunity.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.businessesforsale.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;for-sale-leisure-develop...</a>

I see in this one of the competetive advantages of the US at work.I don&#x27;t believe any patch of land that size, that you could build on in the UK is available for $105k, or about £78k. Let alone one with a partially functioning business installed

This is far cooler than how I&#x27;ve been using my Pi.I&#x27;ve started building a box for managing agents. I hate sitting in front of my Mac all day flipping between terminals. I wanted something that was audio and whiteboard &#x2F; paper first.The Pi has a mic, camera, and projector hooked up. The Pi is always listening, so I just say most commands (i.e. &quot;check logs on backend service, customer xyz said abc is wrong&quot;). I can tell it &quot;look at the board&quot; and it can see things I&#x27;ve written or drawn and can project on top of or alongside anything on the board.Not sure yet if it&#x27;s more efficient, but it&#x27;s definitely more fun.

I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It&#x27;s a more in-depth gig than you&#x27;d think.My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren&#x27;t many recreation options for families. You&#x27;ve heard of a food desert? This is an R&amp;R desert.It had been abandoned for a good reason. The roof leaks, the electrical system was constantly surging, and my 70-year-old bowling equipment (still) doesn&#x27;t work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It&#x27;s the thing you watch during your game, but it fades into the background beyond that. Turns out these things are really cool, but absurdly expensive.Ours was installed in 2008 and cost six figures. It&#x27;s calculating ball speed and trajectory, camera-based pin detection (object detection and trig, on ICs!), runs the fouling, the animations, the pinsetting machine and ball return. Very cool stuff for its age.From the business perspective, my facility only cost me $105k. To forklift-replace the score keeping system runs anywhere between $80-$120k, depending on features, vendor, and unit age. No upgrades or service contracts, mind you, and every feature and customization is a new line item. That&#x27;s for a 1:1 replacement on a system installed in 2008. Incredible, given how fast the tech world moves.Replacement parts cost a shocking $4000 per pair of lanes. But wait, the bowling machines themselves are 70 years old, so what&#x27;s this &quot;advanced&quot; system actually doing back there? Actuating a single relay to trigger that big old machine. Everything else is strictly mechanical. Meanwhile I&#x27;ve got a six-figure invoice in my hand. I&#x27;m upset.Given the state of open hardware, computer vision, real-time event streaming, and open source running megascale products worldwide, there had to be a way to do this myself.So far I&#x27;ve built an equivalent prototype for about $200 per lane-pair, $400 if you&#x27;re fancy. ESP32 and ESPNow with an RS485 fallback, reporting to a raspberry pi lane computer that&#x27;s really just redis and a state machine bolted to an ESP32 gateway for the mesh.Since it&#x27;s all ESP32, I&#x27;ve got a fistful of spare controllers in a drawer, pre-flashed or waiting to be. All common off-the-shelf hardware: microcontrollers wired to relays, optocouplers, and IR-break-beam sensors, each running slightly different firmware. Writing the firmware and protocol is the actual hard part.It&#x27;s an ESPNow star-topology mesh: each node emits events from its sensors and accepts commands for its controls, reporting to a gateway node connected to the raspi over UART. From there it&#x27;s event streaming: RX packets get translated and tossed into redis, commands relay back out to the mesh as needed. RS485 sits underneath as a wired fallback for noisy RF environments.Once the data&#x27;s in redis, it&#x27;s familiar middleware&#x2F;React&#x2F;websocket&#x2F;pub-sub stuff. Any React dev can build their own UI and bowling animations. Since it all runs on commodity hardware, I can do legit anything I want as the proprietor, and I own all my data. Repairs take five minutes; I can swap the rig on a lane pair in under 10. I&#x27;d bet a house like mine could go from zero to running in an hour or two.We&#x27;re calling it OpenLaneLink, and I plan to open source the hardware, firmware, and software stack when it&#x27;s ready. Bowling is fun, and I want to help keep it affordable for alleys like mine.
I hate vendor lock-in. I&#x27;m not a fan of closed systems, calling support for every hiccup, or paying to &quot;white label&quot; my own equipment. Want to go Tron-themed for a night? Good luck finding a neon neumorphic theme in something bought at the turn of the century.All that bugged me. Sure, bowling equipment is niche, but the open hardware and software landscape is amazing.Thanks for reading! Let me know if anyone&#x27;s interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.

Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s