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The history of bowling dated back to ancient Egypt era. Over a long time it has evolved into a popular sport worldwide. In the early days pins were picked up by hands and then put back in their respective places. The process was sped up when spotting machine was adopted in 1961. More recently, computer technology was used to control automatic pin-spotters to perform accurate and prompt setting of pins. The major facilities of a bowling center comprise of the front-end computer system, the so-called accuscore system, and the automatic pinspotter system. After the booming of bowling business some ten years ago most bowling centers in Taiwan face competition as well as maintenance problems in post warranty period. Both the front-end computer system and the accuscore system were modified and when introduced to Taiwan with the help of local computer company. Therefore, it is not difficult to maintain and upgrade. On the other hand, the mechanical part of the pinspotter system is not only patented, but also not economically feasible to manufacture in Taiwan. Finally, the pinspotter controller is a PC-Based mechtronics product. As Taiwan is among the leading computer technology developers, we are convinced that we can develop an automatic pinspotter controller clone to ease the maintenance burden of local bowling business. In order to design an I/O compatible pinspotter controller, we use INTEL 80x86 series personal computer to develop an automatic pinspotter controller. First we analyze I/O signals of the original pinspotter controller in detail and obtain completely list of I/O compatible signals and then we begin to develop an automatic pinspotter controller based on I/O compatible signals. A prototype of pinspotter controller was developed using INTEL 80x86 series personal computer and tested on local bowling center. In summary, we successfully apply mechtronics technology to construct a data scoring system for pinspotter controller and we build a working prototype that can replace those by original manufacture.
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