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

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!

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

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.

I love seeing software engineering applied to physical systems. Replacing expensive proprietary infrastructure with simple, repairable components feels like the kind of engineering that creates long-term value.

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 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.

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.

woah! there's a whole genre of old, abandoned and dilapidated bowling alley pics on the internet and it's amazing. thank you for that!

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)

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.

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 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

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 :)

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

That's the signal in the noise I open HN for, thanks for sharing!

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.

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

> 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.

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?

I think this would make a very nice Youtube video, or ten. Quite niche, but interesting enough for anyone like me to watch.

Godspeed!

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!

Have you thought about starting a youtube channel? I would love to hear more about the tech and the business.

Great project! As I like playing with ESP8266/ESP32 boards myself, I would enjoy reading more about your bowling adventure.

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.

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.

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.

Are you getting any customers?

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.

Well, now you can start your own company installing and providing technical support for your own system. Even though it's open source, many people won't know what an ESP32 is or how to integrate it all. If you can also monitor everything remotely and provide updates via the internet, you might have a good business on your hands.

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.

I would love to see some blog posts and/or videos about this!

Once I had more than a few esp32 sensors about the place, with my own firmware, I got serious about getting the OTA updates working and a good c++ wrapper around the nvram management. I don't like the vibe of multiple sensors not having the fixed firmware, just OCD. Github mianos.

The Hacker part of Hacker News, thanks for sharing! I think you'd get a lot of bowling alley friends all over if you can package this in a way that they can use it, I would assume the Venn diagram of people running bowling alleys and those who know what ESP32 and RS485 means is pretty thin.

With the dark patterns and lock in of LaneTalk I'm wondering if you plan at all to provide scorings to end users at all. Been getting sick of lane talk. I'm also wondering if you have any idea how LaneTalk gets their data and if it's possible to go to the source.

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 :)

Oh nice. I'm a hacker, finally I will be able to win at bowling for the first time in my life!

Did you consider using canbus? esp32s can handle canbus, and it would simplify the topology.

I’m curious what sensors you’re using? My first thought was a camera up above the pins pointing down that can detect them. There are probably more reliable methods. If it were me, I’d seek to simplify as much as possible so things keep running smoothly.

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.

There's a scene where Jack Klugman's character is staying in a hotel in Buffalo and he leans out the window and he looks up and down the street and he says I never knew that one street could support eight bowling alleys

This looks amazing! Wishing you the very best for your success.

I had to read this twice because at first I thought it said that you replaced a $120 bowling system with $1600 in ESP32s and I was like "So you replaced a good-cost system with something more expensive why again?" :D

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.

Hey! Thank you for posting. This a great project and an excellent illustration of progress in technology: commodity hardware and open source software got good enough that you could do this at such low cost and as a solo developer. Great work!

Really cool. This reminds me of escape rooms. Since they're a newer thing, a lot of them rely on modern low-cost DIY stuff like this.

Good project! I've been tinkering with something similar for pinball, arcade, and other coin-operated machines. Lock-in for hardware and software there is a real bummer, but managing payments and security is worth the cost.

I’d love to see a schematic.

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.

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.)?

All this tech is now off the shelf commodity items that anyone with basic skills can put together. For decades this tech was crazy expensive and required assembler machine language programming.

Where is this thing? Would like to visit!

Awesome SRE approach to a physical legacy problem, looking forward to the GitHub repo

Excellent approach to an interesting issue... I hope you will share more information about everything around here! And good luck!

I'm in the midwaste. Love to know where you bowling alley is!

Any photos of the build?

Much love and respect. Nerd on and may the strikes be with you.

That is freaking amazing!!! Love it!!

Wait. You didn't do all that without AI?

Vendor lock-in wouldn't be a problem if successful businesses didn't become lazy, greedy, and dishonest. But somehow...

Cool project! Get a blog and post there, please! Photos, media, anything, is very welcome! One of the most interesting things I’ve read here in a very long time. Don’t let it be wasted to just lie here, for the very narrow audience.

Excited to see the open sourcing of OpenLaneLink!

this post is such a breathe of fresh air (real "hacker" stuff). thank you for posting

Please share more :)

Honestly this sounds amazing for a vlog on YouTube

I've been dreaming of owning an alley

Did you use any AI to help you build this? If so, thats cool but if not, you are even cooler.

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.

This is the stuff I want to read on HN!

Serious and maybe stupid question, also note I don't live in the US. Is this really needed? If you put a scoring pad and a couple pencils in each lane would your customers say "what is this shit", turn around and walk out?

show it running doom and I'm on board

show it running doom and ill believe you

This is awesome! As others noted, it would be cool to have some YT videos about this that might inspire others and promote your project. I'm sure you have copious free time to do this ;-)

- A Digital Twin of the facility in 3D?

- 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?

Why ESP-NOW and not ESP-WIFI-MESH (that has routing, self status, retries, etc. builtin)?

woah! that's cool

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.

$120k for a customized system that's central to your entire business doesn't sound that expensive really. Can you make your own? Sure, but the devil's in the details. Complex systems are always more difficult to make reliable than you think. If it's down and you're losing business, who do you call? Yourself. Besides being a bowling alley owner, now you're a tech startup entrepreneur with one customer. It might end up fine, or you might end up with a whole new set of headaches.

I know this is rationally a good thing to do, but I can't help but be sad imagining this bowling equipment company being run out of business because someone wanted to do their jobs but for free. It's kind of absurd from their pov. Like imagine you own a cafe you've worked hard to grow into a successful business, and then next door some guy opens a cafe with infinite free coffee just because he is a generous guy.

I am compelled to ask: Can this equipment take someone’s arm off? Do you have insurance for that? Does you insurance know you wrote this yourself?

Do you know how often is the score keeping system replaced or requires repairs?

You could potentially have a decent side gig replacing scoring systems for a fraction of others

I would love to watch YouTube videos on your work!

>> Thanks for reading! Let me know if anyone's interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.

I’d say, “yes!” judging from the upvotes.

God bless you

Nice, sounds like a lot of fun. A few years from now one may have 2 businesses, as solving the niche issues is how small business happens. =3

I'm interested in more posts about this bowling nonsense.

Github bro. Github.

That's awesome.

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

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You this guy?

https://youtube.com/@yohnmav

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.

I came for a blog with pictures and details on the development and found none :(

Edit: I had to search for this on my own https://sesamedisk.com/diy-bowling-system-esp32-replacement/