Which webcam should you use for Autodarts?

Autodarts publishes its own camera criteria in the platform’s DIY documentation, and they are worth reading before you spend anything. Condensed, a camera suits Autodarts if it meets these:

This is the counterintuitive one, and it is the reason most people buy the wrong camera. Autodarts’ own documentation states that the most common working resolutions are between 640×480 and 1280×720, and that higher resolutions "seem to have no effect on accuracy".

That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it inverts how everyone shops for webcams. A 4K camera is not a better Autodarts camera. It costs more, it consumes more USB bandwidth and more power, it gives the detector more pixels to chew through — and it does not tell the software anything it did not already know about where your dart landed.

What actually decides whether a marginal call goes right is geometry and optics: where the camera sits, whether the whole board is in frame, whether the lens is sharp and undistorted, and whether the light is even. Resolution is far down that list.

An Autodarts camera stares at the same fixed object, from the same fixed position, forever. That is the one situation in which autofocus has nothing to offer and something to lose — a lens that re-hunts focus because someone walked past, or because the light changed when the ring came on, is introducing variation into a system whose whole job is detecting change.

Focus each camera once, by hand, against something with hard edges — a page of printed text held at the board is the classic trick — and then never touch it again. Our accuracy guide covers the full routine. If a camera you like happens to have autofocus, it is not disqualifying; just be aware it is solving a problem you do not have.

Rather than guess, it is worth starting from the shortlist Autodarts maintains from community experience. Three models come up repeatedly, and the platform’s documentation notes that none of them need manual distortion correction:

Three cameras streaming at once is a bandwidth and power problem before it is a camera problem, and it is the single most common reason a setup that "should work" does not. Autodarts’ minimum requirements ask for three USB ports across at least two separate USB buses — not simply three holes in the side of the machine.

That distinction catches people out constantly. Many small laptops and cheap mini PCs put every port on one internal controller, so three cameras contend for one bus and you get dropped frames, cameras that vanish mid-leg, or a board manager that only ever sees two of them. Nothing about that looks like a USB problem when it happens; it looks like broken software.

Power is the other half. A USB 2.0 port budgets 2.5W and a USB 3.0 port 4.5W, and three cameras plus cable losses can push a weak host past what it will deliver. If cameras behave individually but misbehave together, a powered USB hub is the standard fix and costs very little.

Older advice about Autodarts makes a great deal of lens distortion, and there is a whole chessboard-calibration routine documented for correcting it. It is worth knowing that this became much less of a concern: the platform’s documentation states that from software version 0.24.0 onwards the algorithm accounts for lens distortion itself, so manual distortion calibration is no longer something most people need to do.

It still pays to buy a lens that is close to undistorted — starting from a good image beats correcting a bad one — but if you have been putting off building a setup because the distortion step looked daunting, that step has largely gone away.

You can absolutely do all of this yourself, and if you enjoy the research it is genuinely cheaper. What we sell is the other option: our light ring bundle at £149.99 arrives with the cameras already chosen against the criteria above, mounts printed to fit the ring, and the whole assembly bench-tested on a real board before it is boxed.

If you already own a compatible light ring, the mount kits at £139.99 include cameras too, so you keep the lighting you have already paid for.

We are not going to pretend a camera is magic. The value is that somebody has already made the boring decisions, checked they work together on an actual dartboard, and will get on a call with you if they do not.