You are hereIdea: Open Source Bowling
Idea: Open Source Bowling
Your average "Mom and Pop" small town bowling alley is likely to have a paper score sheet for tracking a team's strikes and spares. For the novice bowler the scoring system can be daunting or just plain confusing. That's why many alley owners have moved to a computerized scoring system. Our local alley has an Amiga-based system that is costly to maintain and getting harder to support... you can't buy an Amiga these days unless it's a scrap system. The people that support such aging systems are likely finding it more and more difficult to source parts and programmers.
This is the kind of problem that the notion of Open Source is great at solving. If someone could take the time to create and document an Open Source hardware and software solution, then many people could benefit from the support businesses. People could sell systems and installation services, maintenance/support contracts, upgrades and enhancements/customizations.
The system should be designed to be "technology change resistant"... defining some standard (and well documented) interfaces for the hardware and software, each piece could be replaced independently with new technology as required.
Such a system would benefit a niche industry, would be good for the alley owners and would be great for the bowlers too... what more can you ask for? Can you imagine a customization that uses BlueTooth to send a copy of the scores to your PDA or phone or can sense when a person comes in based on the presence of their phone and then automatically change their Facebook status or send a Tweet?
Lots of possibilities here :)
I had the same idea and would really like to discuss this further.
I worked for a large bowling company for 5 years. During that time, I created a prototype of a system similar to what you are suggesting. It received data from the pinsetter and displayed scorers on the LCD flatscreen TV uppers and touch screen lowers. It also did things like: email you when you got a strike, used 3D (OpenGL) graphic animation, etc.
The project was shelved and to my knowledge they have done nothing with it.
I would like to start an Open Source project for this idea (again).
Sorry Salamanca, but I haven't given this any more thought after I posted it. Good luck with your project though. I do think it's a good idea. I think the small town bowling alleys are really underserved.