Show 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.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
section33
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!
Cheiree
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 :)
beardyw
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.
nicoboo
Excellent approach to an interesting issue... I hope you will share more information about everything around here! And good luck!
ruaraidh
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.
hyperhello
Real question. Did you have any contact with organized crime? Some of the 'territory' of nothing-type technologies like vending are said to be 'owned' by certain groups.
cworsley4
You this guy? https://youtube.com/@yohnmav
starky
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.
kachurovskiy
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 :)
ectoloph
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.
vikbez
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 :)
holoduke
It'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.
jjkaczor
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!)
Huppie
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.
tomashubelbauer
Please share more :)
kalev
Honestly this sounds amazing for a vlog on YouTube
aashhuttossh
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.
superdisk
Are you getting any customers?
monster_truck
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
newobj
God bless you