181–190 of 375 posts
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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.
Yeah. Anyone who hated writing code but had to, like biologists and chemists, now don't have to.
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Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.
Yeah this $100k system with all its expensive add ons is there to push a single button.
I want to start working with arduino/raspberry pi/esp32/sensors. What would be a good source to buy these in bulk (along with accessory components. e.g. wires etc.)?
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.
Amazing post. I'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/videos of the prototypes in action.
Ai generated wall of text is awesome!!!
It didn't scream AI generated to me.
Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I'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 sys…
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 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'd go with him. 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, fo…
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.
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My local center in a big northeast us city is very cheap during the week, and reasonably priced on the weekends. Surprisingly, even their food and alcohol is priced lower than what you’d expect - cheaper than the sports bar down the block. No idea how they make money, but my kids love it and I love being able to get a good beer while I spend time bowling with my kids.
I think this is the key metric. Get people in the door. 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 co…