Awesome work! I would love to see this documented or at least a video of how everything works, not just to see the electronic setup, but to get a look at the mechanical internals of a 70 year old bowling machine.

Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I've been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.

Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these systems working with newer controls, they had to make time-consuming modifications to the old machines, in some cases modifying the axis motors and that cost added up quickly. The engineer realized that it was theoretically possible to take the old analog position signals and convert them into something a modern motion controller could read.…