Autodarts Desktop
Autodarts Desktop is the free companion app that turns your cameras into a working Autodarts board — detection needs several cameras aimed at the board from different angles, not just one. Under the hood it runs Detection, the actual software doing the camera/dart processing — the same software also used by Headless Installation — and controls it through Board Manager, wrapped in a native app window; see Board Manager below for what that actually means. This is the "separate companion application" mentioned on Devices: setting one up is what adds a board to My Devices, which you can then select from the Autoscoring panel — see Autoscoring.
Like Devices in general, this whole page is optional. You only need Autodarts Desktop if you want a physical board to score your throws automatically. You can play Autodarts perfectly well by entering your own scores by hand.
And if you want autoscoring without setting up a multi-camera rig, Lens scores from a phone or tablet camera instead — no hardware to buy and no calibration step.
Downloading
Get it from autodarts.io/downloads — free for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Installing it doesn't require an Autodarts account, but you'll need one to actually sign in and use it (see First-time setup below).
This page is about Autodarts Desktop, the app most people use — a normal application window you click your way through. If you're setting up a Linux machine as a dedicated board host — e.g. a low-budget mini PC — see Headless Installation instead, a separate setup path for advanced users that does the same job from typed commands, with no window at all.
First-time setup
The first time it runs, Autodarts Desktop walks through a 5-step wizard: Sign up (or sign in), Set up your board, Set up cameras, Calibrate cameras, and Test & Play.
Signing in opens your browser to the normal Autodarts sign-in form — the same account you use on play.autodarts.com. Once signed in, return to the app to continue.
Set up your board — give your board a name.
Set up cameras — detection needs several cameras aimed at the board from different angles. How many isn't something you choose; it's set by your hardware. For each feed, pick its camera, resolution, frame rate, and standby time.
Calibrate cameras — on each feed, rotate the highlighted segment overlay with the arrow buttons until it actually sits on top of the board's 20 segment.
Test & Play — throw a few real darts to confirm detection works.
The default view
After setup, this is what Autodarts Desktop's own window looks like day to day: Controls (Restart/Stop/Reset/Calibrate), detection software update status, a couple of preferences, external links (Play/Docs/ Discord), and the live board view. This is Board Manager's own Monitor view (see below) — Autodarts Desktop is just showing it inside the app window instead of a browser tab.
Showing up in My Devices
Once set up, your board appears on the My Devices page — this is the same page that's empty on a fresh account.
The icons on the board's card, left to right:
- Start/Stop — start or stop detection on this board.
- Calibrate — triggers autocalibration on this board's cameras directly, without opening a separate screen first.
- Board Manager (the tile-grid icon) — a shortcut to this board's Board Manager. Only shows up once the board is already linked to a running instance (see Pairing below), and works from any machine on the same network as that instance, not just the one it's running on.
- Copy board ID — copies this board's ID, one of the two values (with the API key) that connect a running Board Manager instance to this account board — see Pairing.
- Follow board — opens a page that always shows the current match on this board.
- Share board — share this board with other accounts (e.g. multiple household members using the same physical board).
- Generate new board ID and API key — issues a fresh pairing pair for this board, e.g. to connect a different machine's Board Manager to it.
Board Manager
The actual software doing the detection work is called Detection — both Autodarts Desktop and Headless Installation are just two different ways of running it (with, or without, the native app window around it). Either way, you control and monitor it through Board Manager, its local web interface: on whichever machine Detection is running, reach Board Manager in a browser at http://localhost:3180 from that same machine, or that machine's address on the network from anywhere else on the same network.
Board Manager's own navigation: Monitor, Vision, Config, Calibration, and Distortion.
Monitor — controls, status, and the live board. This is exactly what Autodarts Desktop's default view shows, just in a browser tab instead of the app window.
Config holds the camera settings from setup (camera, resolution, frame rate, standby time, calibration options), plus this instance's Board ID and API Key — see Pairing a Board Manager instance below for what those do.
Pairing a Board Manager instance
A Board ID and API Key are what connect a running Board Manager instance to a specific board in your account — generated on My Devices (either when creating a new board there, or via the Generate new board ID and API key icon on an existing one), then entered into that Board Manager instance's Config tab (Board ID / API Key fields, Save) to link the two. Unlink disconnects them again.
The first-time setup wizard above does this for you automatically once you sign in — you only need to do it manually for a headless install, which has no browser to sign in through.
Vision (troubleshooting)
The Vision tab is a diagnostic view into the detection pipeline itself, useful if darts aren't being detected correctly and you want to see what each camera sees at each stage. Day-to-day, Monitor is all you'll need.
Its sub-tabs: Live (the raw camera feed), Motion (highlighting currently-detected movement), Movement (highlighting how detected movement changed between the last few darts), and Dart (a hitbox drawn around where the software thinks each dart landed, highlighted in orange).
Motion highlights, in yellow, whatever movement the system currently sees on the board — this is how it flags that something is happening (a dart has just hit, or is still settling) before it's classified.
Movement compares detected motion across the last few darts, one tile per camera/dart combination, color-coded:
- Green — the current state.
- Yellow — motion in the same spot as the previous state.
- Red — motion that was present in the previous state but is now missing (e.g. a dart that fell out, or got shifted away by another dart landing near it).
- Gray — the last dart, unchanged from the previous detection.
Following a board
Follow board (one of the My Devices icons above) opens a page that always shows whatever match is currently being played on that board — handy for spectating a specific physical board. It shows this when nothing's being played:
