Comment by simondotau
1 day ago
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.
Probably better to enable it only for strikes/spares as it would drain too much time, but the idea is great.
The instances that I'd want a replay are more likely to be when I /don't/ strike – I want to review the ball's motion through the pins and off the deck on unsuccessful shots so I could understand how to adjust my next fresh rack delivery.
When you say drain too much time, you mean due to it being a distraction? Then I would try to optimise it so that it's playing the slow-mo immediately, and maybe at 50% speed so that the 3 second buffer is played out in just 6 seconds.
If you wanted to be REALLY clever, you could get it to start playing the slow mo the moment the ball is detected.
Or perhaps replays could be gated behind a button push. Ball detection copies the current video buffer into an secondary buffer; the button plays whatever is in the secondary buffer.
Or you could make it a web app, and stream replays to people's phones when they're on the alley's wi-fi. That has the benefit of making an epic moment saveable and shareable.