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 :)

I love it! I actually looked at integrating with scoremore myself, but once I crossed into hardware world, I still couldn't get over how much fouling alone cost. $750 / unit and they're -ancient-.

Definitely will post on bowl-tech as well. I'm just new enough to have a lot of that new-guy anxiety around posting OpenLaneLink there yknow? Those guys know -everything- about this stuff.

Well, it's because those guys knows everything that they'll notice the little things you might have missed :)

Have fun first !

Is the fouling functionality more complicated than one would assume? From a naive perspective, it seems like it would just be a simple photo-eye sensor

Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.

The pinsetter is either "on" or "off", there are no other states to manage. Once it's on, it runs indefinitely: it sets the pins, clears the alley, resets the remaining pins, and repeats the cycle, all without any external control.

On mine, I do have some "feedback info" on which pins are down + a signal to "when" to score points, but this is optional as you can also write your score manually if you have no scoring computer system.

When I was in a junior league we were at a relatively recent vintage alley and once in a while it would glitch and reset the pins twice in a row. I bet the relay stayed closed too long.

That one relay is the only connection between the pinsetting machine and the scoring system.

> Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.

Your car also starts with a single relay... that drives a solenoid and a motor.

Yeah this $100k system with all its expensive add ons is there to push a single button.

But at least now I know why the lane near me just has a physical button next to each lane (and manual scorecards)

Well, and to display your score.

Point of clarity: my </sarc> remark was not in reference to the original post and project (which I love!).

It was in reference to this comment (which I should have pasted):

> Yeah this $100k system with all its expensive add ons is there to push a single button

I’m just going to say I am going to find a way to be the third person in your bookclub. This is so cool!

Hah! I remember playing a couple times in one of those Alf Minibowling machines in Madrid in the early/mid nineties... It's a string machine, isn't it?

Kind of funny that factory is in a small town next to Zaragoza...

  Location: France
  Remote: Yes, but I can be in Paris 1d/week
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, GCP, Docker, Linux, PSQL, K8S, hardware (not exhaustive, I am happy to learn more)
  Résumé/CV: https://vik.tf/cv.pdf
  Email: mromaingay(at)gmail.com

Senior SRE / Fullstack / Maker & Hardware hacker

2013-2018: Founding engineer of Scaleway

For the last 3 years I have been working at a self-sustained startup as a DevOps/SRE focusing on global performance improvements, reducing cloud budgets, enhancing architecture, bootstrapping the platform to China in compliance with RGPD and PIPL, security fixes, added CICD pipelines, added K8S, SSO SAML Auth and various other interesting tasks.

I'm a valuable asset if you need someone capable of greatly improving various aspects of your company. I also mentor other developers and love to share knowledge on what I know. I want to keep things clean, simple, and easily expandable for others. I’m capable of taking the smart shortcuts to implement the critical path and unlock the business.

My side projects involve hardware and software, where I create and develop fun stuff such as a self-playing piano, custom-made arcade machines, reverse engineering, restoring cars etc… I have a broad range of interests, and I apply this in my daily life. I'm the guy who gets called when nobody can fix something.

Currently, I am working 80%, but I am open to considering other offers.

Thanks for reading !

  ┬┴┬┴┤･ω･)ﾉ├┬┴┬┴

  Location: France
  Remote: Yes, but I can be in Paris 1d/week
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, GCP, Git/Gitlab, Docker, Linux, PSQL, K8S, hardware (not exhaustive, I am happy to learn more)
  Résumé/CV: https://vik.tf/cv.pdf
  Email: mromaingay(at)gmail.com

Senior SRE / Fullstack / Maker & Hardware hacker

2013-2018: Founding engineer of Scaleway

For the last 3 years I have been working at a self-sustained startup as a DevOps/SRE focusing on global performance improvements, reducing cloud budgets, enhancing architecture, bootstrapping the platform to China in compliance with RGPD and PIPL, security fixes, added CICD pipelines, added K8S, SSO SAML Auth and various other interesting tasks.

I'm a valuable asset if you need someone capable of greatly improving various aspects of your company. I also mentor other developers and love to share knowledge on what I know. I want to keep things clean, simple, and easily expandable for others. I’m capable of taking the smart shortcuts to implement the critical path and unlock the business.

My side projects involve hardware and software, where I create and develop fun stuff such as a self-playing piano, custom-made arcade machines, reverse engineering, restoring cars etc… I have a broad range of interests, and I apply this in my daily life. I'm the guy who gets called when nobody can fix something.

Currently, I am working 80%, but I am open to considering other offers.

Thanks for reading !

  ┬┴┬┴┤･ω･)ﾉ├┬┴┬┴

  Location: France
  Remote: Yes, but I can be in Paris 1d/week
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, GCP, Git/Gitlab, Docker, Linux, PSQL, K8S, hardware (not exhaustive, I am happy to learn more)
  Résumé/CV: https://vik.tf/cv.pdf
  Email: mromaingay(at)gmail.com

Senior SRE / Fullstack / Maker & Hardware hacker

2013-2018: Founding engineer of Scaleway

For the last 3 years I have been working at a self-sustained startup as a DevOps/SRE focusing on global performance improvements, reducing cloud budgets, enhancing architecture, bootstrapping the platform to China in compliance with RGPD and PIPL, security fixes, added CICD pipelines, added K8S, SSO SAML Auth and various other interesting tasks.

I'm a valuable asset if you need someone capable of greatly improving various aspects of your company. I also mentor other developers and love to share knowledge on what I know. I want to keep things clean, simple, and easily expandable for others. I’m capable of taking the smart shortcuts to implement the critical path and unlock the business.

My side projects involve hardware and software, where I create and develop fun stuff such as a self-playing piano, custom-made arcade machines, reverse engineering, restoring cars etc… I have a broad range of interests, and I apply this in my daily life. I'm the guy who gets called when nobody can fix something.

Currently, I am working 80%, but I am open to considering other offers.

Thanks for reading !

  ┬┴┬┴┤･ω･)ﾉ├┬┴┬┴

I made a player piano from scratch ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ_YsPFDjQ (improved since I took the video).

I do a LOT of custom stuff (mechanics, woodworking, house rebuilding, electronics, ...) but this is my favorite one yet, kind of sad I'm bad at showing the stuff I make :D

If you have any idea of what kind of job I could do to make use of all these skills I would be happy to have your thoughts !

I think it would be cool if you made a "player xylophone". I love the tonal sounds of wood and have thought to do the same. Similarly a plucking piano with bass strings that you play like a piano but sounds like a bass guitar.

Well I recently home-made a player piano [1] this will be perfect for it :D Thanks !

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ_YsPFDjQ

Very nice work! How does it (does it at all?) control how hard it hits from one note to the next? What does the striking - solenoids?

Yes, it uses solenoid based actuators. Not sure if it controls the dynamics too, but one way to do that would be by driving the actuators using a curve modulated by high frequency PWM; probably quite hard to calibrate to MIDI key velocity since those actuators are essentially on/off devices, but doable.

A very nice project, I'd love to see some more information about it.

WIP code but I added infos here: https://github.com/vikbez/PlayerPianoController/

Thanks! So - midi velocity translates to PWM and hence solenoid force? Cool. You can always add some kind of mapping function if lower velocities are too low force. Nice work.

(old pre-electronics player pianos could do dynamics but most relied heavily on input from the operator to do so - with various limitations - it's probably a good plan to avoid directly imitating them :-)

Very cool - do you have a write up?

Magic!

Eizo EV2730Q-BK

More interesting than the chassis. If this had 3840x3840 resolution I would buy two of them. The 1:1 aspect ratio is very attractive.

Yeah - I want that monitor but the dpi is a little too low to justify the price.

Fun :D it remembers me when I did this index.svg page like 10 years ago: https://vik.io/index.svg

I then used svg animation, but still seems to work perfectly today !

What are your opinions on SVG Animation vs CSS?

Well you can do amazing things with svg animations; there are a lot of interesting examples here that would be hard to reproduce in CSS: https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/ (like try to do the car following a line example in css ...) but I try to stick to css animations for better "reviewability" of the code. SVG animation is a niche thing :)

SVG seems like a under-utilized method! ;)

I used this with great results: https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js

It's pretty awesome, but it's lacking a few very important things. The first I noticed was that it has no support for saving and loading shared object libraries (SOL's), which are what pretty much every flash game used to save data between sessions. They're pretty much 'Flash cookies.'

Also, it, like pretty much every other project except lightspark, doesn't seem to implement much of AVM2/ActionScript 3, which the "last generation" of flashes mostly used. Lightspark supports more of it, but still has severe rendering issues.

There is https://github.com/ienaga/swf2js that works really well.