Contactless Floodlight Payments for Carrick-on-Shannon Tennis Club

Carrick-on-Shannon Tennis Club's new clubhouse opened this summer, alongside a smaller but very visible upgrade: the coin-token floodlight timer on its courts is being replaced by a contactless payment system we designed and built for the club, free of charge.

The problem

Turning on the court floodlights at Carrick-on-Shannon Tennis Club has always been separate from club membership — historically through a token-operated timer, which meant keeping physical tokens on hand just to play an evening game. Earlier this year the club installed new LED floodlights, funded through a Leader grant, giving significantly better light quality with less glare and light spill. That upgrade was also the natural moment to modernise how members pay to switch them on.

The solution

We built a contactless alternative that sits alongside the existing token system rather than replacing it outright. Players scan a QR code posted at the court, choose a court and a time period, and pay through Stripe's hosted checkout. A successful payment switches the floodlights on automatically for the period paid for. The old token machines remain available in the meantime, but the QR flow is now the primary way members activate the lights.

How it works

• Scan the QR code posted at the court.
• Choose the court and duration — for example one or two hours on a single court, or both courts together.
• Pay securely through Stripe.
• The floodlights switch on automatically for the period paid for.

The stack

• IoT smart relays: professional-grade relays wired into the floodlight circuits and switched remotely, rather than by a physical timer.
• AWS: bespoke automation code, hosted on Amazon Web Services, receives the payment confirmation and triggers the correct relay for the correct duration.
• Stripe: handles the payment itself through a secure, hosted checkout — no card details pass through our code.

Why we took it on

Our founder, Diego Sevilla, is a member of the club, and a token machine that only takes exact change is exactly the kind of small, everyday friction that a bit of cloud infrastructure is good at removing. It's a modest project by our usual standards — one payment flow, one integration, a handful of relays — but the brief was identical to any client engagement: understand the real constraint, then build something reliable enough that nobody has to think about it again.