SERIES · 8 PARTS
What began as a wish to truly understand my darts game became a training app of my own. Across eight parts, I tell how Dartbude grew step by step with statistics, a coach, opponents, a tablet display and a camera.
There are plenty of apps that keep score in darts. What I was missing was something else: a place that would show me whether I was actually improving. In early May 2026, I started building that place myself. I called it Dartbude.
A training app has to prove itself at the board first. As long as I had to walk over to the laptop to enter every throw, even the best statistics were of little use. So the first question was simple: could I practise at the board, quickly enter my hits and see straight away on the tablet what came next?
It’s hard to tell whether I’m improving after a single evening. Sometimes things go well; sometimes they don’t. Only over several weeks does it become clear whether my doubles are getting more reliable or whether I keep struggling with the same targets. That was exactly what I wanted Dartbude for. Now it needed to start making sense of my throws.
After practice, I often stand at the board for a moment and wonder how the session really went. The app already has the numbers. What was missing was someone to interpret them for me. Not a chatbot or a motivational speaker, but a brief, honest assessment: what went well, what didn’t, and what should I practise next?
Dartbude was meant to be a training companion, not a scorekeeper. I’ve stuck to that. But games are part of practice too. A 501 under pressure feels different from any drill, and a checkout that decides a game teaches you more than ten checkouts with nothing at stake.
The idea sounds simple: a smartphone sits on a tripod in front of the board, recognises each dart and records the hit automatically. I throw, pull out the darts and throw again. No more tapping. In practice, this became the most demanding chapter of the whole Dartbude project, and it is not finished yet.
As long as I was the only one using Dartbude, I could live with small quirks. I knew which button needed pressing twice and which display was briefly wrong after a restart. Once other people use the app, that is no longer acceptable. So before release came a long stretch of looking for bugs instead of building anything new.
An app nobody knows about remains a private hobby project. I wanted Dartbude to become more than that. It needed a place to introduce itself, explain what it could do and let interested people get in touch.
