Rock 'n' Bowl

About the client

Rock 'n' Bowl is a Louisiana institution. Live music, bowling, food, and the kind of night out that makes the city what it is. There are two locations now, in New Orleans and in Lafayette, and both run on the same lane-management system we built.

The challenge

The bowling lanes had been running on a hand-built system made of Raspberry Pis controlling the pinsetters and iPads showing scoring at each lane. It worked, once, but the original developers stopped supporting it. Rock 'n' Bowl reached out to us with a narrow ask: keep the iPad app compliant so it does not disappear the next time Apple changes its rules. We took a look at the system and told them the truth. Keeping the iPad app alive was going to be a treadmill, and every year it would get harder to find people who could work on the older stack. Better to fix the shape of the problem, not just the next symptom.

Our solution

We proposed moving the whole thing to a locally run web application.

A modern Django backend with real-time lane state

Django 5 with Channels and Redis for WebSocket-driven, real-time lane state. Every pin knocked down, every score change, every lane reset propagates to every screen in the building as it happens. Daphne serves the ASGI stack, django-crontab handles the scheduled cleanups, and PostgreSQL is the source of truth for games, accounts, and history. The scoring engine has its own module with its own tests, because getting scoring right is the one thing you cannot ship broken.

A progressive web app for lane displays and staff tools

Instead of a native iPad app, a PWA built with Vite, React, and TypeScript. Runs on any tablet or laptop the venue already has. Installable to the home screen like an app, but with none of the App Store review, provisioning-profile, or renewal overhead that killed the previous stack. When a screen dies, you replace it with any modern tablet, point it at the local server, and it is working before the next frame ends.

Kept the Raspberry Pi hardware, wrapped it properly

The Pis that drive the pinsetters, ball returns, and bumpers were still solid hardware. We kept them and put a clean interface between them and the new backend. The lane hardware speaks the same GPIO protocol it always did; the difference is that it now talks to a system somebody is actively maintaining.

Better tools for staff and management

The staff view got real tools: reset a lane, adjust a score, comp a game, swap in bumpers, all from any tablet in the building. Management got the oversight and reporting layer the old system never had: game history, lane utilization, revenue attribution per lane, per shift, per weekend.

Rollout

Built in six months. Rolled out to the first location in three days. Ran successfully for two months, then rolled out to the second location in a single day, because everything except the physical hardware carried over.

What is next

We are now moving into the hardware side. Rebuilding the lane computers around better cooling so they last longer and burn out less; upgrading the pin-detection cameras to sharper models that capture more data per frame, which means fewer mis-scores and better analytics. The playbook is the same one the software follows: fix the shape of the problem, not just the next symptom.

Results

Two Rock 'n' Bowl locations running on one platform that Accolades actively maintains. The venue is no longer held hostage to a native mobile app treadmill. If you have a legacy hardware plus mobile system that a former team walked away from, we can tell you honestly whether to keep patching it or replace the shape underneath.