My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren't many recreation options for families. You've heard of a food desert? This is an R&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't work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It'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'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'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's this "advanced" system actually doing back there? Actuating a single relay to trigger that big old machine. Everything else is strictly mechanical. Meanwhile I've got a six-figure invoice in my hand. I'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've built an equivalent prototype for about $200 per lane-pair, $400 if you're fancy. ESP32 and ESPNow with an RS485 fallback, reporting to a raspberry pi lane computer that's really just redis and a state machine bolted to an ESP32 gateway for the mesh.
Since it's all ESP32, I'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'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'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's in redis, it's familiar middleware/React/websocket/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'd bet a house like mine could go from zero to running in an hour or two.
We're calling it OpenLaneLink, and I plan to open source the hardware, firmware, and software stack when it's ready. Bowling is fun, and I want to help keep it affordable for alleys like mine. I hate vendor lock-in. I'm not a fan of closed systems, calling support for every hiccup, or paying to "white label" 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's interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.
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 & play, but he didn'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't worth the time unless you're already building something similar. Either that or my ability to see opportunity sucks!
This kind of thing is a low-volume, low-margin business by nature. It'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'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's a shame, really.
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'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.
1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale.
2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)
It should be possible to just replace the flywheel altogether with a generator/motor that both brakes and powers during each cycle, cancelling vibrations. Then more generation during deceleration, and more power during acceleration.
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.
It's really easy to pull $300k/y as an SRE (but that does amount to about $100/hr equivalent in SMB, assuming realistic >40h workweeks and the tax advantages in SMB, even less if you have to pay for services you enjoy and can't find time for due to FTE - nannies or even changing your own oil).
It is extremely hard to keep that $100/hr and a sliding scale - one week you work 50h, the other 30h, then you take a month or three off at $5h/week.
Mine (and I don't regret these) is running midsize PV plants. Slightly bigger than residential (hey, does OP want solar PV on the rooftop? I have a bowling alley as a client, they are a great match), but again not large enough to attract a scaled business.
I approximately put in 5h on each a year after the initial setup (around 100hr each), for $10k/y in profit from each.
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.
Maybe a way for non-programmers to better understanding what they are saying, is to think about translation. It's kind of like saying a person doesn't need to know anything about Spanish to now sell LLM translated books from English to Spanish.
Yes, the LLM can do translations for you, and quickly. But, as you don't know Spanish, you won't know how good the translation is. You are less likely to catch all kinds of mistakes, from bad grammar to wrongfully translated idiomatic expressions. The less Spanish that you know, the more likely you are to be impressed or fooled into a false sense of security. Then when native and fluent Spanish speakers read your books, they may rate it as mostly gibberish and nonsense.
The same goes for the LLM, but it replies in minutes and costs next to nothing, so you can correct it quickly, and you don't even have to be politely patient with it to avoid hurting its feelings
On one hand, it results in some absolutely horrendous code that takes 100x longer to run than necessary, because it lacks the most basic principles of engineering. On the other hand....it works and does what is asked of it.
Like all things, helpful as long as it's checked very carefully.
Those tools are built for quick iteration. Compared to that, using an LLM surely feels a lot like programming. Also a lot less deterministic.
They'll even volunteer to do so and recommend.
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'd leave out the "old" 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's lots of cases where you don't want to cut costs¹, quite often a cheap variant cuts it just fine. So apparently there's a lot of Pie'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 "service" can be bought with it.
Or a friend who installs (climate) control systems in (food)factories, who cludges together arduino's and some hacky web-interfaces, who is certain that the industry would love some "off the shelve" 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 "lock ins", where a factory starts off with AcmeInc controllers and then slowly Acme will start charging almost "extortion-fee" alike figures just to fix stuff on a sunday night.
Or, a friend who has a fruit farm with lot's of freezer-storage (running hundreds of KWs), whith whom I cludged together some Arduino'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'm certain that there's hundreds of thousands of small warehouses, supermarkets, traders, logistics that could save a few hundreds to thousands of €'s a year, by controlling their freezers, heaters, pumps, pressurizers, dryers and whatnots smarter with "turn key" modules built from generic low cost hardware.
--
¹ relevant: There's a lot of "Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM" 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's no-ones fault.
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.
https://khmpsitka.org
It's an interesting approach that's way simpler than relying on soil moisture sensors placed high up on mountainsides. It's not as widely applicable as measuring soil moisture directly, but it's been running steadily for over 5 years now.
My interest was not drowning, rather than pecuniary.
At my shooting range, where security is very important, we're replacing the old antiquated "fire stop" (when everybody on "shared" lanes has to stop shooting for there'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 / "fire frei" ("free to shoot").
We mostly decided on the switch after a failure of the old system: the "free to shoot" 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 "door locked" / red light / "fire stop", 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 1/50th of the quoted price.
I 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 "ball received" 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'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!):
* https://www.bowltech.com/forum/small-scale-bowling/small-sca...
@vik8 on discord if you need :)
Definitely will post on bowl-tech as well. I'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.
Have fun first !
Kind of funny that factory is in a small town next to Zaragoza...
On mine, I do have some "feedback info" on which pins are down + a signal to "when" to score points, but this is optional as you can also write your score manually if you have no scoring computer system.
Your car also starts with a single relay... that drives a solenoid and a motor.
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'm pumped. So much room for activities!
Your beginners have to come for shoes anyway, and the pointer to which lanes to take (you don't want them taking a lane at 6:30 that's reserved at 7)
(Or something more complex)
1: maybe make the ball look like it isn't rolling - or even backspinning
2: perhaps it could you make the amount of side-spin or other spin more obvious to help learning
Maybe hard to read the ball rotation accurately: even if the ball was marked with dots or bands that help?
- DMX kinda sucks but it's manageable. Cabling isn't cheap, it really wants shielded 120 ohm cable. If you do go that route, don't cheap out and use Mic cable or Cat-5, you'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't care about it being perfect, or over Ethernet with an ESP32 with an Ethernet PHY or a Teensy or similar. I'm serious, you can implement it in an afternoon. Lots of COTS lighting controllers can talk Art-net, and you'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's a little more complex. Not to shill LLMs... I hadn'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's 250kbaud RS485, so it's not always trivial to just make a USB-serial-RS485 adapter that will actually run at that baud rate. With the Art-net/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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control
Sure, professional bowlers use specialised shoes. Professional footballers and professional runners and cyclists and golfers and tennis players and skateboarders and ... do as well. But if you do any one of these activities at a low enough frequency and/or level that you're not buying your own specialised shoes, whatever sneakers you have will do just fine.
I was a little surprised when the local bowling centres stopped bothering to make everyone use the proper shoes. I get what you're saying about playing casually, but when I last went bowling with colleagues, and won comfortably, and others were asking for tips because they just can't roll the ball properly, but won't try proper shoes, they tried to wind me up by telling me I was "cheating" by using the proper shoes that are offered for anyone who wants one - I can't win :)
If you did this in tennis shoes, or any shoe with proper soles, the friction would cause your feet to stick and it'd be simply impossible. Socks would be much better than normal shoes, but then you have the opposite problem of too little friction and it's difficult to maintain control. Bowling shoes aren't like running or something where a pro runner is going to have some absurdly expensive pro shoe that improves his time by a fraction of a percent. They're much closer to something like ice skates for ice skating.
And yeah that's a pro with perfect perform, but even a beginner who's not just walking up to the lane, stopping, and throwing, is going to have to deal with sliding. It's just part of the game.
[1] - https://youtu.be/_qh4yOwCgOg?t=12
That's a good way to put it.
Bowling is very rare for me these days, but because they used to require you to wear bowling shoes, I've become used to the slide and can't bowl without them. I have tried a few times in my normal shoes, and found it almost impossible not to go arse-over-tit when letting go of the ball.
Bowling shoe vs running shoe? As soon as you’re trying to get better, the shoes matter a lot. They let you use the established techniques.
Bowling shoe vs socks? Never tried it, but I’m going to guess once you can break 100 that socks don’t cut it.
Nerds seem to forget that entertainment venues and sports are social spaces, interaction with staff matters, and is one of the more distinguishing features of a venue.
Unless you've got someone walking up and down the lanes introducing themselves as the manager/owner/whatever...
My thinking on that is, don't make the customer get up if they don't need / want to.
Long story short, the intent of the kiosk isn't to delete human interaction. Honestly, I implemented it as a way to summon servers or bowling mechanics, and any self-service options I could think of as-needed. One doesn't have to use the kiosk, they're just there as a convenience thing.
It depends a lot on whether your customer base is made up mainly of one-off walk-in casuals, or regulars. Getting to know the regulars, and having a chat with them, can improve the feel of being in work for the staff themselves, as well as providing a more friendly and welcoming atmosphere.
The OP described this particular case as being in a small town, with not many other options for entertainment, i.e. a small captive audience. You could say the customers don't have much else to do so it doesn't matter if you're a miserable git, they'll still come. But just being friendly and chatty makes all the difference to a lot of people, and can help you build a loyal audience of core customers who'll choose your place over the few alternatives, will keep coming, keep bringing more friends and family, and sometimes even support your business in unexpected ways.
Which I like because I always have to try a few sizes to get one that actually fits.
Sure you can jack up prices on food and drink. Sure you can fleece the people who do come, but everyone who stops coming "because it's too expensive" is lost forever.
The alternative is to create a space people want to come to. Yes sell food & drink. Being "good value" helps that. Being expensive fights it.
While yes, the flashy electronics is cool, do people come for that? Does it make it more fun? I just saw the ball with my own two eyes. Does an animation make it better?
What brings in a family? Work colleagues? Teenagers on a date? What brings in more competitive folks? Is there progression? What makes my friend group go once a week? Why do housewives want to hang out there at 11am? How to catch the bored teenagers at 3pm in the afternoon?
It's not even just about bowling. Can you create a space people want to come to?
Over many years I've tried to work out where a positive vibe comes from (mostly at food and beverage places).
My current theory is that a good vibe is an emergent behaviour from the customers.
Obviously poor managers/owners can make a toxic place (but negativity is a completely different issue from creating positivity). I've witnessed many owners think they can create a vibe, but then crash and burn (especially when taking over somewhere with an existing vibe). They often don't seem to understand how they failed (maybe have excuses that don't ring true). Starting or buying a business requires ego, but too much ego leads to mistaken self-belief.
I'm sure a wise manager can encourage a vibe to grow, but actually it seems like the customers drive the process.
Maybe it's just a human thing that like-minded people create spaces for themselves.
I watched the vibe at one place radically shift from tradies to more gentrified customers. Same owners and staff. I also suspect I'm just not good at it myself, so I lack the skills to even see why someone is good (and might not even understand if they try and explain to me).
Anyone else tried to grok how a good ambience grows? Is there some standard for learning it?
2. Something about preventing people from rubbing the bowling balls on your precious lanes.
3. Laser light shows + Liquor license = Bowling Alley Wine Mixer
Sorry, 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!
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/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'm excited for you, this is a super fun project with endless sidequests.
and yes, you should post pics and stories like when jwz renovated the dna lounge. (i think one of his first posts was about building his own pos system, fwiw)
Mostly he worked at the local 16-lane alley with ancient AMF machines. The logic was all relays in a "chassis" on each machine. Relays would fail, pins and balls would end up where they'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's -- wasn't good. Most of the operating profit back then came from alcohol sales and that's a totally different business.
Good luck! Recently Facebook has been showing me a lot of bowling content. Be cool if it's making a comeback.
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.
Ben stiller produced a documentary for HBO "Born to Bowl" and it was very engaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Bowl
We so desperately need more 'third spaces' and Bowling Alleys are great for this
Good luck with your new business!!! It sounds super exciting, hope everything works out, the roof, the patrons, and all.
[0]https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/ninepin-bowling-end...
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'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.
* 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 1/4 speed.
* Finally, restart the recording loop.
If it'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't go to any other alley.
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's phones when they're on the alley's wi-fi. That has the benefit of making an epic moment saveable and shareable.
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.
(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'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 / 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. "check logs on backend service, customer xyz said abc is wrong"). I can tell it "look at the board" and it can see things I've written or drawn and can project on top of or alongside anything on the board.
Not sure yet if it's more efficient, but it's definitely more fun.
I bet if you did a deep dive into Micros or Aloha POS at restaurants you could find similar opportunities for the rpi (and piss off an Oracle rep).
I love how this write-up started with acronyms I don't know, and ended with React and websockets, bringing it back home!
Sometimes I wish I inherited a farm, or auto shop, or something (bowling alley) so I could tinker on large scale, useful solutions using modern tech like this. Keep messing around you might land on a major, major innovation that the whole world uses.
I don'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
But you're right in general. Looks like this former bowling centre in Inverness is asking for £1.5m: https://uk.businessesforsale.com/uk/for-sale-leisure-develop...
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.
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.
I remember some classmates interned working on new / different firmware for the machines you're talking about though. Fun project for an internship!
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'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'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 "never work in this industry again" was used several times.
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.
Indeed, it does. I wonder if anyone has ever correlated those changes to the decline in bowling popularity? It'd probably be difficult to verify how much of an impact it had (if at all) when there are so many other factors contributing to the decline.
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 :)
Thank you for sharing; I'm so glad for you that it worked out.
Nonetheless, you've done a fantastic job here.
I wonder what sort of things you could do to harden the system. From potting to overbuilding to redundancy.
While I'm not really defending the markup of the commercial system, you'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).
Godspeed!
Looking at the insides, there are massive circuit boards with dedicated logic chips - your standard HEF series NOR and NAND gates and all sorts of things. Boards mounted on boards. Huge mechanical relays with a loud clunk. All of it can now be replaced by parts that are tiny, solid state and are highly unlikely to fail due to wear/tear/usage. Granted, we all moved over to MAME long ago, but this post does not surprise me.
On a topic not exactly related to the implementation of the ESP32 and hardware, what other R&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've done with it since you bought it.
Pinball seems to be having a bit of a renaissance in some areas
Lanes have been switching to Brunswick all-in-one string pinsetter/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 /r/bowling yet?
Absolutely. This is what makes open source extremely powerful - ability to take absurdly small niches no big tech company is willing to fill.
Made me laugh.
As a side note, I do enjoy the bizarre bowling animations that the screens come up with.
About that: do you have any questionable quality animations for strikes etc.? To me it was always a major part of the whole experience.
Best of luck and please post some images/videos of the prototypes in action.
It didn't scream AI generated to me.
For those not familiar it uses WiFi packets to send short messages without any WiFi log on.
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.
What would be a good source to buy these in bulk (along with accessory components. e.g. wires etc.)?
You can find kits that have a selection of sensors - enough to get started and experiment
https://www.adafruit.com/product/193
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-esp32-s3.html
You can get a range of ESP32 boards from Digikey for $5-$8 and you'd have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get them much cheaper than that on Aliexpress.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tMSdAswo4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhSoGizjxo
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. :-)
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 "modern" 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 "reformed" businesses are just some joker'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 'bowling machine' space are stellar...but I have my doubts given what I've seen elsewhere.
- 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/mapmap projection mapping,
Open Lighting Architecture has a list of Ethernet Protocols including OSC, and a list of USB/Serial/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's possibly not as much need to model the whole system with TLA+ and check the proof.
Could ask the model about an "SIL" (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/orange-ish.
- UV Blacklight paint, UV LED Black light.
Blue light glasses are great for reducing UV blacklight glare.
- Best LED projector 2026
- Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo host Issues, repos and can run Actions with nektos/act.
Cool project. Integrate an issue tracker with mobile notifications?
You could potentially have a decent side gig replacing scoring systems for a fraction of others
I’d say, “yes!” judging from the upvotes.
That said, didn't you just shift the cost instead of reducing the cost?
It's of course subjective, and the goal of the question isn't to devalue your work, au contraire, I'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
https://youtube.com/@yohnmav
Edit: I had to search for this on my own https://sesamedisk.com/diy-bowling-system-esp32-replacement/
That link is so weird... it's definitely referencing this HN post, but those codeblocks in there... That's an interesting piece. Looks like their blog generator vibe-coded what it thought my firmware would look like.