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The game of darts grows up

September 09, 2002

Why should throwing pointed darts at a target board be solely a bar amusement? Unlike cricket, one of the other national sports in Britain, darts has long since established itself on the continent: It was introduced to Germany in the 1970’s by stationed British soldiers. As it became more popular, local players formed clubs, followed by the establishment of regional associations, which finally led to the founding of the German Darts Association in 1982.

As more and more tournaments were held, the need for an automatic system to record hits and add up score became increasingly apparent. The first electronic dartboards, made of plastic, were able to do so using pressure-sensitive fields. However, a steel dart would shoot holes in the plastic with time, damaging the detector electronics. Much to their disappointment payers were therefore obliged to use “toy” darts made of plastic too.

The game of darts has now grown up: An electronic board, developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT, allows players to use professional steel-tipped darts.

“When we began to address the problem from a technical viewpoint, several sensor systems came under consideration,” says Reiner Borsdorf, head of the business area product development and process design. “We therefore made use of various product conception theories to make our choice. Using the TRIZ-method - the theory of inventive problem-solving, the innovation roadmap developed at our Institute and the technology calendar, we systematically indentified the sensor system which was most suited to the task in question.” Rapid-prototyping processes were used to produce prototypes, which were tested and cyclically refined. Finally, the engineers came up with a board which automatically detects the impact of a dart in just 0.1 seconds without fail.

Yet how can a steel-tipped dart penetrate the natural-fiber material sisal without damaging the electronic circuitry? Unlike traditional sisal boards, a network of plastic partitions separates the target sectors, or beds, from each other. The engineers incorporated strip conductors into this web. Fed with current, these loops build up oscillating circuits at a defined frequency. When a steel dart hits a certain sector, the metal detunes the frequency of the invisible air-coil. This divergence is registered and analyzed electronically using a specially developed algorithm. The engineers deliberately used standard components for the hardware, in order to make the dartboard commercially viable in the near future.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft