Comment by section33
2 days ago
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!
Tap to pay probably doesn't help with getting people into the alley but probably helps with 'one more game'.
Your beginners have to come for shoes anyway, and the pointer to which lanes to take (you don't want them taking a lane at 6:30 that's reserved at 7)
At least you could display a message that says "this lane is reserved. Open lanes: 6, 7"
I'm sorry which lanes are open again?
2 replies →
Available lanes are lit green and reserved are red ?
(Or something more complex)
Hopefully you can synch the light flashes to the ball rotation:
1: maybe make the ball look like it isn't rolling - or even backspinning
2: perhaps it could you make the amount of side-spin or other spin more obvious to help learning
Maybe hard to read the ball rotation accurately: even if the ball was marked with dots or bands that help?
That sounds quite hazardous to anyone who happens to be epileptic.
Dunno where you live, but according to this (https://www.epilepsy.com/stories/shedding-light-photosensiti...) from a US charity: About 3 to 5 percent of the 2.7 million Americans with epilepsy (approximately 100,000 individuals) are photosensitive. That's a lot, but the chances of one walking in to that bowling alley are likely negligible. Photosensitive epileptics are highly likely to be aware of their condition and avoid risky environments in any case.
Hell yeah brother, this sounds like a fantastic project with a lot of room to dig into fun things with the double extra bonus of other people having fun with the result. Now you have me shopping for a bowling alley :D
Ugh, there is a four lane bowling alley right near me for sale for $100,000 or so. Now I’m further tempted.
Buy it! What else are you doing with your money?
3 replies →
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 ESP32 with an Ethernet PHY or a Teensy or similar. I'm serious, you can implement it in an afternoon. Lots of COTS lighting controllers can talk Art-net, and you'll be amazed at how trivial it is to make a Python script to blast out the appropriate UDP packets.
- sACN is the new kid on the block for this stuff though and it's a little more complex. Not to shill LLMs... I hadn't actually heard of it before, Claude mentioned it and then one-shotted both a server (ESP32-side) and a test client (Python). There were a couple little bugs, but about two hours from never having heard of the protocol to having existing COTS lighting design software talking to it was pretty dope.
The other annoy bit with DMX: it's 250kbaud RS485, so it's not always trivial to just make a USB-serial-RS485 adapter that will actually run at that baud rate. With the Art-net/sACN approach, it is trivial to get an ESP32 or similar to run at that baudrate and drive the RS485 DE pin correctly as well.
Enjoy!
"Don't use mic cables"
I've used mic cables for 1000+ shows over 20+ years with no issues. I guess most of my runs have been at most 100-200 feet if distance is the issue. Wireless/wifi controllers are the only things I've had consistent problems with.
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)
Can affirm Art-net is supereasy to implement indeed. One thing you shouldn't skimp on is the DMX controller. I've used DMX to USB controllers in the past, but those have lots of driver issues. The better ones operate over Ethernet and you can just use UDP. I've been using a Showtec box, but i'm sure there are other alternatives as well.
Best post in a lonnnng time. Need any help? I have some dmx/dj experience from my days in digital signage.
Oh man, Id love to find cheap surplus digital signs
This sounds like such an amazing adventure, good luck I'm sure it will be a huge success!
How are you handling bowling shoe rental?
Nowhere near the OP (UK) but I've noticed a lot of fun-only lanes arent bothering to rent shoes and just let you wear whatever you have.
Never understood the need to wear extremely uncomfortable and ill-fitting shoes just to throw a ball. Always seemed like a way to jack the price up.
Sure, professional bowlers use specialised shoes. Professional footballers and professional runners and cyclists and golfers and tennis players and skateboarders and ... do as well. But if you do any one of these activities at a low enough frequency and/or level that you're not buying your own specialised shoes, whatever sneakers you have will do just fine.
16 replies →
We just charge a flat rate with shoes included. We do $5 / person or $25 for a whole hour for larger groups. Wanted to take some of the advanced calculus out of the price of bowling, yknow?
My local bowling alley charges $130 for shoes and 1 hour of bowling for 4 people off-peak. That scales up to $220 peak rates (e.g. Saturday night). It’s in the middle of a major city so it’s a different market of course, but the pricing difference is striking. No pun intended.
1 reply →
What is wrong with you, you’re going to ruin capitalism not caring about maximizing profits.
3 replies →
Isn't that included in the lane price? Always has been for me.
I think they mean the physical process of handling the shoes. At most places you rent your land and get your shoes at the same counter, basically in one transaction, which seems difficult to handle with a kiosk.
8 replies →
Which could be removed, which I, a customer, would very much enjoy. Bowling prices are absolutely insane these days. Haven't been in over 10 years. Related, nearly all of the bowling lanes in my area are empty, except for birthdays/work events.
5 replies →
1. Can we stack two lanes on top of each other, please? Make homemade bunklanes?
2. Something about preventing people from rubbing the bowling balls on your precious lanes.
3. Laser light shows + Liquor license = Bowling Alley Wine Mixer
Sorry, I got overly excited by your reference. I say that so GD much, at least once a month, for nearly 20 years now haha. SOOO much room for activities!
This is interesting, i built similar for retail environments, oneoffs for events or windows or whatnot. I'm sure you could probably get away with a few terrible webcams per lane for ball tracking it's pretty much a perfect environment. A totally flat level lit are with very little noise with one circular blob moving through it. Might be an issue if you do the ever popular blacklight lanes night bowl thing, maybe just a switch to look for light blobs instead of dark blobs ;)
An NFC system for tap to play should be a pretty straight forward proposition as well on open hardware. Have tags, tie their unalterable ID numbers back to a credit card/account and you are good to go. Start it with your regulars, league players if you have them, whatnot. You can also tie that back to league scoring. A few lanes at a time.
I'm excited for you, this is a super fun project with endless sidequests.
Have you ever written online about your projects? This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. And your suggestion about a webcam makes me think about a problem a client and I had a couple of years ago that was never solved. It would be a completely controlled visual environment, so an ESP-cam just be the ticket if he's still interested.
RFID tags in the heels of the bowling shoes, tied to the users account. Implant a reader in a spot by the lane - stomp to play!
Sounds like amazing fun. Good luck with it.
I love this idea!