A tabletop bowling lane machine you can 3D print at home

Bowling is a fun sport, but many of us see the complicated machinery running behind the scenes as just as engrossing. How do all of the mysterious contraptions actually work to pick up and reset pins? Now you can find out for yourself and also enjoy bowling at home by backing Danny Lum’s Mini Tabletop Bowling machine on Kickstarter.

This campaign is for an entirely digital product: the 3D models, bill of materials, code, wiring diagrams, and instructions to build the Mini Tabletop Bowling lane. And it has been wildly successful, raising nearly $70,000 from over 750 backers so far.

It is easy to see why: this is a marvel of engineering. It does everything you’d see at a real bowling alley, just in miniature. It picks up and resets pins, it returns balls, it keeps score, and it even has optional bumpers for beginners. Aside from electronic components and some off-the-shelf materials, such as the wood lane and the fasteners, the entire six-foot-long machine is 3D-printable.

We don’t know much about the electronics under the hood (that information is part of the product being sold), but we do know that an Arduino handles the logic. Kickstarter backers will receive an Arduino sketch that is ready to flash onto the board — a sketch that they can tweak to modify the behavior and features.

This looks like a really fun project, so be sure to back the Kickstarter campaign before December 4th to get the best deal if you’re interested.