What’s Hyper Bowling?

About the speaker

Moreno Bengala in 1989 received the master’s degree in electronic engineering at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Moreno worked as electronic designer in Datalogic (Bologna) and MD
(Modena). Throughout 2000 he was a consultant for constructing type 4 safety devices at Sick (Germany). He is the inventor of 4 European patents, also extended to the USA and Japan, for applications made using LASER scanners. Since February 2002, he has been working in QubicaAMF, and has been involved in the design of almost all the electronic boards installed in QubicaAMF systems.

Abstract

Many of you already played Bowling: it’s about throwing a ball over a wooden lane to hit pins at the end of the lane itself, being careful the ball doesn't fall into the lateral channels. The more pins are hit, the higher is the score. This is the classic bowling. Hyper Bowling instead it’s a game that, taking advantage of the mechanical barrier named bumpers (that are typically used to help children when playing), follows different rules. The player still has to throw a ball to hit pins, but in this case, the bumpers are an opportunity to exploit. In fact, the bumpers prevent the ball from falling into the channel and help players to make rebound shot.

We put lengthways sw controlled LED RGB strips on the top of the bumpers. In this way we make several light effects like show a well-defined position that should be hit before the pins, by the ball, in order to gain a multiplied score factor. The smaller would be the position to hit, the higher the multiplied factor. By these LED strips, we can turn on several light effects to make an attractive, dynamic and captivating show; for example it’s possible to turn on few LEDs subsequently following the ball on its move. That’s what we have been asked to design and realize: from our electronic point of view the challenge has been to take advantage as more as possible of the internal peripherals of the microcontrollers in order to keep most of the complex functionalities in a few single chips.