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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 t
by section33 2mo 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!
- dd8601fn 2mo agoSounds like amazing fun. Good luck with it.
- Polizeiposaune 2mo agoHow are you handling bowling shoe rental?
- ErrantX 2mo agoNowhere 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.
- semi-extrinsic 2mo agoNever 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.
- KennyBlanken 2mo agoIn the US they're just slippery enough to keep you from wrenching your ankle, the bowling lane knows they will have clean soles, and the soles won't damage the floor.
- Projectiboga 2mo agoReinforced toes? That might be a reason.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoHmm, thought they needed to slide. Like formal dance shoes, the opposite of sneakers.
- tmh88j 2mo agoMostly to prevent damage and minimize maintenance + cleanup. Dirty shoes can mess with the oiling and rocks lodged in soles can gouge the floor.
- abanana 2mo agoIt's because the way the sole slides is an integral part of bowling the ball. You can't play "properly" without a proper sliding bowling shoe. I was a little surprised when the local bowling centres stopped bothering to make everyone use the proper shoes. I get what you're saying about playing casually, but when I last went bowling with colleagues, and won comfortably, and others were asking for tips because they just can't roll the ball properly, but won't try proper shoes, they tried to wind me up by telling me I was "cheating" by using the proper shoes that are offered for anyone who wants one - I can't win :)
- semi-extrinsic 2mo agoAppreciate the good answer. Out of curiosity, ofder of magnitude how much would a person need to be bowling to get good enough that choice of shoe matters?
- bluGill 2mo agoSocks with no shoes are good enough for amateurs. Maybe even better than the worst bowling shoes. I'm not sure where the level of shoes matters is crossed, but socks gets that a lot farther than street shoes.
- somenameforme 2mo agoIf you mean bowling shoe vs non-bowling shoe (as opposed to exact brand/type of bowling shoe), then they matter a lot even for a complete beginner. In a normal throw you're going to have a bit of momentum moving up to the lane and then release. You need to slide on your feet when you do this. In this [1] video go frame by frame at 12 seconds (or any time he bowls), you'll see his left foot in particular slide several inches during his throw. It's more subtle, but there's also a significant slide with his right foot as it goes across. If you did this in tennis shoes, or any shoe with proper soles, the friction would cause your feet to stick and it'd be simply impossible. Socks would be much better than normal shoes, but then you have the opposite problem of too little friction and it's difficult to maintain control. Bowling shoes aren't like running or something where a pro runner is going to have some absurdly expensive pro shoe that improves his time by a fraction of a percent. They're much closer to something like ice skates for ice skating. And yeah that's a pro with perfect perform, but even a beginner who's not just walking up to the lane, stopping, and throwing, is going to have to deal with sliding. It's just part of the game. [1] - https://youtu.be/_qh4yOwCgOg?t=12 https://youtu.be/_qh4yOwCgOg?t=12
- tjoff 2mo agoIsn't that included in the lane price? Always has been for me.
- bee_rider 2mo agoI 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.
- section33 2mo agoTotally - we've got notifications wired in though, so our counter instantly knows "lane so and so needs such and such shoe sizes"
- KennyBlanken 2mo agoYou're removing human interaction, though. Nerds seem to forget that entertainment venues and sports are social spaces, interaction with staff matters, and is one of the more distinguishing features of a venue. Unless you've got someone walking up and down the lanes introducing themselves as the manager/owner/whatever...
- Johnny555 2mo agoIf I go out bowling with friends, I'm there to socialize with my friends. If I rent the lane from a Kiosk, I'm fine with that being the end of the transaction I don't need the manager to come introduce himself.
- bluGill 2mo agoMost people don't know that the real money is food and alcohol. Buy pizza and drinks for everyone and they should throw the lane in for free.
- tclancy 2mo agoHow did you read everything OP posted and come to that conclusion?
- section33 2mo agoWe 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?
- tclancy 2mo agoWhat is wrong with you, you’re going to ruin capitalism not caring about maximizing profits.
- Crunchified 2mo agoIn capitalism, any intentional non-maximization of profits is philanthropy. Nothing wrong with that.
- Neekerer 2mo agospare me your humanitarian sarcasm
- section33 2mo agoI did a capitalism, but I messed it all up!
- mypalmike 2mo agoMy 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.
- Barbing 2mo agoLucky Strike across from San Francisco’s baseball stadium prices like that, ouch.
- luma 2mo agoHell 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
- kci225 2mo agoUgh, there is a four lane bowling alley right near me for sale for $100,000 or so. Now I’m further tempted.
- quietsegfault 2mo agoBuy it! What else are you doing with your money?
- sleepybrett 2mo agoThis 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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2mo agoHave 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.
- sleepybrett 2mo agoclients used to have stuff on their sites, i used to keep a private portfolio, but its been years and i do platform stuff now. Hobby shit like this on the side for my own amusement, when i can find the time.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2mo agoRFID 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!
- dimator 2mo agoThis sounds like such an amazing adventure, good luck I'm sure it will be a huge success!
- Aboutplants 2mo agoI love this idea!
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoBest post in a lonnnng time. Need any help? I have some dmx/dj experience from my days in digital signage.
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoOh man, Id love to find cheap surplus digital signs
- robocat 2mo agoHopefully 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?
- TylerE 2mo agoThat sounds quite hazardous to anyone who happens to be epileptic.
- RichardHesketh 2mo agoDunno where you live, but according to this (https://www.epilepsy.com/stories/shedding-light-photosensitivity-one-epilepsys-most-complex-conditions 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.
- TylerE 2mo agoWhy make a recreational activity "risky" when it has zero reason to be?
- hinkley 2mo agoTap 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)
- pants2 2mo agoAt least you could display a message that says "this lane is reserved. Open lanes: 6, 7"
- stuaxo 2mo agoAvailable lanes are lit green and reserved are red ? (Or something more complex)
- 6_7 2mo agoI'm sorry which lanes are open again?
- six_seven 2mo ago:)
- stasomatic 2mo agoDid you really just claim a username to reply? Love it, someone’s more bored than me. 9-10.
- tonyarkles 2mo agoI'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!
- 20after4 2mo agoUDP 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control
- tonyarkles 2mo agoYup, 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)
- esikich 2mo ago"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.
- topato 2mo ago1. 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!