What is automatic dart scoring?
Anyone who has played darts with friends knows the struggle. Every turn needs to be counted and subtracted, which gets more difficult and tiresome after a few beers. Automatic dart scoring solves that problem. Cameras around the board register exactly where every dart lands, and software calculates the score instantly — no arithmetic, no arguments, just play.
Over the past few years a small market has grown up around this idea, with names like Scolia and the Target Omni. Gungnirdarts is our own answer to that: a self-developed system, built from the question "can this be done better without these cameras sticking out?"
How does it work, in short?
With Gungnirdarts, the cameras aren't mounted above the board, which makes those systems bulky and prone to being bumped by the player. Instead, they're built into a ring around the board itself, at roughly the height of the board surface. So they don't look down from above; they look almost horizontally across the board. Each camera keeps track of what changes compared to a calm background image. The moment a dart lands, a clear difference appears in the image — and that difference is used to work out
the angle, as seen from that specific camera, toward the dart.
Combine the angle from two or more cameras, and the system can calculate exactly where the dart is on the board: each camera effectively "points" a line toward the dart, and where those lines cross is the hit point. The more cameras that report a valid angle, the more robust that calculation
becomes.
Why build it yourself?
Gungnirdarts started as a DIY project based on a Raspberry Pi and four cameras, and has since evolved into the Freya: a compact, ready-to-use system measuring only 64 x 72 x 17 cm, with four cameras fully hidden inside the ring. All image processing happens locally on the device itself — no internet connection and no subscription are needed to play.
The companion Gungnirdarts app (free, for Android and Windows) connects via Bluetooth to the tracker and offers classic games such as 501, Cricket and Round the Clock, alongside statistics, heatmaps of our throws, online matches, and even the option to build your own games with GungnirScript.
Where does this differ from the rest?
Over the coming weeks we'll be explaining specific Gungnirdarts features and put Gungnirdarts head-to-head with other competitors one at a time. Each of these systems makes different choices — open source versus ready-made, local versus cloud, subscription versus one-time purchase. Plenty of material for some interesting comparisons, which we'll share here over the coming weeks.