A Projector Is the Perfect Dartboard Augmentation
Jedimasta took advantage of their dartboard’s electronic capabilities to provide a projector-based scoreboard augmentation.
Admit it: you don’t know how to keep score in a game of darts. There is no shame in that, because literally nobody does. That’s why electronic dart boards were such a massive success when they hit the market. Finally, people were able to compete under the guidance of objective rules. But Redditor Jedimasta wasn’t satisfied with a tiny LED display score readout that players have to squint to see. So, they took advantage of their dartboard’s electronic capabilities to provide a projector-based scoreboard augmentation.
Jedimasta had a dartboard that was indistinguishable from those surrounded by pinholes on basement walls around the world. It was one of those big hunks of black plastic where each section is essentially an oversized button and Jedimasta took advantage of that fact for this upgrade. Now the dartboard projects a big scoreboard onto the wall. It even has neat animations (created in Adobe After Effects) and sound effects, which makes it feel a bit like a TV scoreboard at a bowling alley.
That part about oversized buttons wasn’t a joke. From an electronic design perspective, it is basically just a big membrane keyboard. The dartboard’s original controller just scanned through the “button” states like it would with a standard keyboard matrix. The key to this modification was the addition of a microcontroller development board to scan those same pins.
Jedimasta says they used an ESP32 dev board for this purpose and the reason for that will become obvious in a moment, but the photos show an Arduino Uno. We assume that they used the Arduino during the prototyping phase to identify the matrix pins, then switched to the ESP32 board. Regardless, they programmed the microcontroller in the Arduino IDE.
The ESP32 was the right choice because it has an onboard WiFi adapter. That lets it send POST requests (carrying JSON data) over the network to a local Node.JS server. That server keeps track of the game, including the current player and score, just like the dartboard’s original controller did. It then outputs a video signal with the scoreboard graphics. It could send that video to a regular old monitor, but it looks much more impressive with a projector like Jedimasta chose.
At this time, it can handle both 301 and Cricket. In the future, Jedimaster may add functionality for other darts games — assuming, of course, that any other games exist (nobody knows).
