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

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

#191

Post by jevogel »

pants2 wrote: post #130
alentred wrote: post #48

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 re…

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

Bowlers often like to use their own balls, so it would be more useful to have a system that doesn't rely on modifying the ball.

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

#192

Post by HalfCrimp »

walrus01 wrote: post #166

> 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. 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…

> 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?

Pinball seems to be having a bit of a renaissance in some areas

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

#193

Post by eru »

fragmede wrote: post #180
eru wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. And in addition, Claude and Kimi and friends will happily do version control and write tests etc.

They'll even volunteer to do so and recommend.

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

#196

Post by somenameforme »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #109
abanana wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the way the sole slides is an integral part of bowling the ball. You can't play "properly" without a proper sliding bowling shoe. 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 jus…

Appreciate the good answer. Out of curiosity, ofder of magnitude how much would a person need to be bowling to get good enough that choice of shoe matters?

If you mean bowling shoe vs non-bowling shoe (as opposed to exact brand/type of bowling shoe), then they matter a lot even for a complete beginner. In a normal throw you're going to have a bit of momentum moving up to the lane and then release. You need to slide on your feet when you do this. In this [1] video go frame by frame at 12 seconds (or any time he bowls), you'll see his left foot in particular slide several inches during his throw. It's more subtle, but there's also a significant slide with his right foot as it goes across.

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

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

#197

Post by simondotau »

One thing I'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 1/4 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.

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

#198

Post by tonyarkles »

20after4 wrote: post #179
tonyarkles wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll throw out two quick suggestions for you: - 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 E…

UDP rules for this sort of thing. Art-net sounds very similar to OSC¹ and that's a good thing. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control

Yup, they're definitely cousins. The only reason I didn't mention OSC is because you're not going to have the same ecosystem of existing open-source and commercial lighting control software available. OSC is fabulous for controlling all sorts of things and nails that COTS software compatibility layer for lots of other live production scripting stuff. (e.g. if you implement OSC on an ESP32 you can control what it's doing from an existing iPad app)

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

#199

Post by silisili »

fragmede wrote: post #180
eru wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm mixed on this. They may not(or may) write elegant code, but they have clear intent about its parameters and purpose. I've seen LLMs mess up numbers by order of magnitude on multiple occasions, which could range anywhere from annoying to fatal, depending on the field.

Like all things, helpful as long as it's checked very carefully.

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

#200

Post by ryukoposting »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #53

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 think I see some parallels with the aftermarket for old cars. Holley's entire catalog is "here's a thing that'll modernize your 1960s engine without replacing the whole damn engine"

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.

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