Snap the scoreboard and let an AI read the scores: a little pinball score tracker with cloud sync.
Pinball Points is an iOS app for pinball players that turns a photo of a machine's score display into a tracked game record. It pairs on-device camera work with an AI vision model to read the scores, then keeps a personal stats dashboard, a high-score history, and optional public profiles you can share. A few small pieces sit behind it: an AI proxy, a sync API, and a website for the marketing pages and profiles.
The app captures one or more frames of the scoreboard, uses Vision to find the display region, and sends compressed images to a vision model through a server-side proxy that holds the model credentials. When you take several photos of the same display, the app cross-references them and uses a consensus vote across the results to settle on the final per-player scores. It starts with a fast, inexpensive model and only reaches for a stronger one when confidence is low or the results disagree. Game records are saved locally and sync to the cloud through an append-only operation log, so edits and deletes stay consistent across devices, and public profiles are rendered on the server from the synced data.
Turning private game records into opt-in public profiles, rendering them server-side from synced scores, wiring a single link back into the iOS app, and capping a follow graph before it can sprawl.
Feb 1, 2026 · syncAn append-only sync log grows forever. Here is how I prune it on a six-hour schedule, and how a single per-user watermark keeps a phone that has not synced in months from quietly losing data.
Jan 26, 2026 · syncWhole-record last-write-wins can quietly lose edits across devices. Here is how I ended up syncing Pinball Points game records as an append-only log of operations instead, and the small details (sequence cursors, idempotency, compaction) that made it hold together.