DIY Autodarts: How an IT admin got into darts

A colleague recently discovered darts and wanted to join a club right away. But when he showed me the absurd prices for ready-made tracking systems like Scolia or pre-configured autodart setups, my DIY heart went into overdrive. There has to be a cheaper way! As a complete darts novice, but a passionate tinkerer, I quickly put together a DIY materials list for him.

The setup: A Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q as the brain, a Winmau Blade 6 board, the Target Corona light ring, and a few cameras. Add to that some 3D-printed mounts from the community and the undisputed all-purpose weapon of any serious IT infrastructure: cable ties. He approved the list (initially without a touchscreen), and I assembled the hardware for him. My colleague is overjoyed. The board is in his basement, has already seen over 10,000 arrows, and is running with an impressive 99.0% accuracy.

So I thought to myself: I'll build one of those too! Same setup, but of course as an upgrade with a touchscreen. And that's exactly where the classic IT drama began.

Autodarts tracks darts by detecting pixel changes in the camera image. As I painfully discovered via the community Discord, we've inadvertently installed the "wrong" cameras. The Decxin OV9732s have a significantly inferior sensor compared to the recommended HBV2710s. This results in some wonderful false positives: the dart lands perfectly in the 20, but the system confidently tracks a 5, a 1, or mentally shoots the dart straight out of bounds. The absurdity of it? On my colleague's board in the basement, these poor sensors hardly matter. On my setup, the algorithm seems to go haywire much faster.

Fortunately, hardware bugs can be fixed with software. The browser add-on "Tools for Autodarts" allows for wonderful system customization. Instead of boring standard caller voices, our system now fires off custom sounds – in other words, a veritable meme storm. And since a local project isn't truly complete until it has its own URL, the sound files aren't just stored anywhere, but are cleanly hosted on my own server at https://mirror.mrunk.de/autodarts/ .

In the end, it's like any good IT project: it works (most of the time), there are hardware glitches that can be circumvented with software, and bugs are simply debugging instructions from the universe. Game on!