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SportsDesign complete on paper (stages 1-6), not built

CornholeCam

Overhead cameras that auto-score bar cornhole and stream it with a live score overlay

A camera head over each board scores every round under ACL rules (3 in the hole, 1 on the board, cancellation), reads bag colours, tracks rounds and innings, saves a replay of every throw, and drives a bar-TV scoreboard and an OBS or YouTube overlay.

Who buys it
Owner or general manager of a bar, brewery or eatertainment venue running weekly cornhole leagues on 2 to 8 lanes; also local ACL directors and league operators.
Why it pays
No score-keeper and no scoring disputes. If streamed, stat-tracked leagues grow by 4 teams, a 4-lane bar earns about $1,900 more per season in food and drink (est.) against $29 a month. Darts players pay $199 to $1,560 per board for camera autoscoring.
Target price
$590 venue hub (or $0 with an existing Edge Hub) + $449/lane + $29/venue/month (target)
First-minute wow
A bag slides in and within 2 seconds the bar TV shows +3 RED, 14 to 9, with a slow-motion replay, and the YouTube overlay updates at the same moment.
See the CAD designConcept page
CornholeCam concept: the idea and where each part goes
The concept. The CAD design is below, under Printable CAD.

What the research found

And how this design answers it

  • Scoring arguments (hanging bags, cancellation maths) → ACL scoring engine with a frozen settled frame and a replay per throw as evidence, plus a one-tap check only when unsure
  • Dim, neon-lit bars → score on still frames after the bag settles, flicker-safe exposure, board-referenced white balance and the alternating throw order as a colour prior
  • Bags under other bags → board state tracked throw by throw, with covered, knocked-off and in-hole bags reconciled to 4 + 4 per round
  • In-hole certainty → vision plus an optional under-board VL53L5CX time-of-flight sensor that times each bag falling through
  • Ceilings from 2.5 to 4 m, truss or no drilling → standard or Wide Camera Module 3, homography with parallax correction, printed truss clamp or light-stand head
  • Several lanes per venue → one Edge Hub and one PoE switch serve 4 lanes; scoring needs under 1 inference per second
  • Patron privacy → cameras look down at the boards, no audio, no face recognition, streaming off by default with a LIVE badge

Use case

Tuesday league night

League playersBartender / league hostCornholeCam hub

  1. 01Trigger: the host taps Start league night; players scan the lane QR and show their bag colour once
  2. 02Detection: each throw settles, and the hub segments the bags and assigns board, hole or off within 1.5 s
  3. 03Scoring: after 8 bags the cancellation result and new score appear on the TV and the stream overlay
  4. 04Action: the game result posts to league standings, and players get PPR stats and clips by QR

Outcome: No score-keeper, no disputes, standings live by close, and about 20 shareable clips a night

How it works

Architecture

  1. 01

    Sense: Pi Zero 2 W + Camera Module 3 head over each board on PoE; optional VL53L5CX hole sensor under the deck

  2. 02

    Decide: Edge Hub (Pi 5 + Hailo) segments bags on settled frames, classifies colour and runs the ACL scoring state machine in Node.js

  3. 03

    Send: local MQTT and WebSocket to the TV, tablet and overlay; RTSP + obs-websocket to OBS; events only to the cloud

  4. 04

    Tell: bar-TV scoreboard, stream overlay, per-throw replays, league tables and player stat pages

Hardware

Real parts, buyable today

Bill of materials: about $490 per venue hub plus $315 per lane with hole sensors (est.).

BlockPartWhy this part
HubRaspberry Pi 5 8GB + AI HAT+ (Hailo-8) + TL-SG1210P PoE switchShared IEMI Edge Hub; 8 PoE ports = 4 lanes
Camera headRaspberry Pi Zero 2 W + Camera Module 3 (SC0872 standard / SC0874 Wide)1080p30 H.264 encode, autofocus and HDR, 2.1 to 2.9 mm/px on the board from 2.5 to 4 m
Head powerWaveshare PoE Ethernet/USB HUB HAT for Zero (802.3af)One Cat6 cable per head on the ceiling
Hole sensorPololu 3417 VL53L5CX 8x8 ToF + Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3Independent in-hole signal under the deck, $25 in parts
ScoreboardHub HDMI kiosk or Fire TV Stick HD browserUses the venue's existing TVs

Mechanical

Printable CAD

6 parts, generated from code and checked as closed solids. Pick a part to inspect it, or download the STL files to print.

See the CAD parts render
CornholeCam printable parts, rendered from the CAD
Render of the printable parts from the actual CAD. Not yet printed or photographed.

Loading the CAD…

Real CAD · drag to rotate · scroll to zoomReal CAD · swipe sideways

Open risks we are working on

  • A top camera cannot see a front-edge bag touching the ground; the system prompts instead of guessing
  • Covered and stacked bags on a crowded board could break the 98% round-score target
  • Venues may see it as a toy and not pay $29 a month; test with 10 league bars first
  • Zero 2 W + PoE HAT stack height and RJ45 position are unmeasured

Design stage only: nothing on this page is for sale. Specifications and prices are targets.