alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It's a more in-depth gig than you'd think.
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.
Comments
Lol, nice! It depends on what you mean by "owning a bowling center," but it looks like there are at least two of us into this :D
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 :)
Right now I'm working on adding LED + DMX DJ light control - I kinda want to be able to order LED strips to "chase" 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'm pumped. So much room for activities!
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, 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.
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 'third spaces' and Bowling Alleys are great for this
Bowling centers (and restaurant PoS) as predecessors to modern infra is interesting in general.
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.
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.
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]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.
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.
This is far cooler than how I've been using my Pi.
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 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's always working on developing a video game every time I'm there although he may have finished by now. Maybe there's more overlap between bowling centers and software engineers than OP thinks.
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.
I see in this one of the competetive advantages of the US at work.
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
This is awesome, and I'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't fully replace actual group activities in meat space, but I guess it's just not as profitable since it doesn'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.
Heh - do you have a "blog" (ala jwz'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!)
There is only one thing left to do. Get an old copy of Lightwave from the 90's and make more of those bizarre strike animations.
I highly recommend you start a YouTube channel and document all this. It sounds like gold and would be really interesting.
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.
Back when I was in school I interned at a company installing bowling lanes / 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.
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 :)
I think this would make a very nice Youtube video, or ten. Quite niche, but interesting enough for anyone like me to watch.
Godspeed!
I nominate this post as an archetypal example of content that belongs on the Hacker News site.
Thank you for sharing; I'm so glad for you that it worked out.
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.
I'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 https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels - albeit with just 1 ESP32 per machine :)
With a materials to retail cost multiplier of x10 (which is on the low side), your system wouldn'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've done a fantastic job here.
Short repairs are always nice, but I'm curious about the frequency. You're your own repairman, but that won't be true for all owners. So it's not if the repair takes 5 minutes, it's how long the lanes are down any time there's a problem.
I wonder what sort of things you could do to harden the system. From potting to overbuilding to redundancy.
I’m living in an R&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
There’s a series of absolutely solid arcade game repair/service videos on YouTube, showing common faults and how to diagnose and fix them. The videos were actually recorded as part of a training series for working technicians during the hey-day of arcade games (now long gone in the West). Time was money so the diagnosis and fix had to make dollars.
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.
> 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 be very interesting to see some photos of your facility and what you've done with it since you bought it.
This is all extremely interesting.
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?
> Sure, bowling equipment is niche, but the open hardware and software landscape is amazing
Absolutely. This is what makes open source extremely powerful - ability to take absurdly small niches no big tech company is willing to fill.
Really interesting stuff! If you're looking for bowling animations I'd look into https://youtu.be/ZXpETSoNWxY
Made me laugh.
This is great content. Have you thought about a second income stream by teaching prospective tech business owners on Youtube? It's a model ppl are successfully using?
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.
I love stories like this. You’re doing more for your community than you even know!
Great project! As I like playing with ESP8266/ESP32 boards myself, I would enjoy reading more about your bowling adventure.
Have you thought about starting a youtube channel? I would love to hear more about the tech and the business.
When you'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.
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'll point my alleys to your creation when it's public.
Ah, that's extremely cool! I'm enjoying hacking around with ESP32s etc at the moment (maybe it's just nice to do something physical that an AI can't) and it's amazing how mature the hardware ecosystem around them is. I'd love to hear more, both about the tech and the economics.
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've alluded to. Way to go.
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.
I would love to see some blog posts and/or videos about this!
Any plans to let people create accounts to track their scores over time?
75x markup and the entire moat was "what if your customers know what an ESP32 is." turns out one of them wanted Tron-themed laser shows bad enough to learn soldering.
> 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.
I'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.
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 :)
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 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!