Pinball Stomp: Part 2

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is the 2nd and final part of this project. If you haven’t seen part 1 yet, jump back and check it out.

Now that we have the controller box made and ready to go, we just have to build some simple stomp sensors. As I said before, I doubt this will hold anyones attention longer than a night or two. With that in mind, I wanted to make this as cheaply and simply as possible.

To make these, you need the following:

  • Foam board or thick cardboard
  • aluminum tape
  • wire
  • duct tape

That’s it… no really, that’s it. Check out the video after the break to see how it all went, and what the kids thought of it.

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Building giant temperature displays from Gottlieb display wheels

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On Saturday, we found a cool article where pinball machine display wheels were being used as a display. In that article, one of the listed inspirations was this giant Gottlieb wheel being used to display the water temperature of a pool.  Before we go further, we’d like to mention that this project is hosted on a magazine’s website that requires you to register to get 1 free download. We did, and no financial information was required.

[Ludovic], they author of the project, was looking for an efficient and highly visible way to display the temperature in his pool. He wanted something he could see from 30 yards away, that had minimal power usage. These pinball reels were perfect, being easy to read and having virtually zero power draw when not updating.

Keep reading for a video and some more information.

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Using pinball score reels as wireless displays

May 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Scott] put together a system where he can use pinball score reels as a wireless display. As you can see in the video below, the result is really neat. The sound alone makes this shoot pretty high on our “things that are cool” radar. The display required 24V AC to operate the solenoids that actually let the display rotate, but he found that an 18V DC supply would allow him to fire a single solenoid. No problem, he just staggered their operation. This is barely perceptible due to how long it takes for the mechanical part of the spinning to occur.

You can download his Arduino sketch and see more on his site. He has big plans too, he just got 4 more of these to add once they are cleaned up.

[via Adafruit]

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Pinball Stomp: part1

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Despite my atrociously short attention span, I’ve always loved pinball. Maybe it is something about all the flashing lights and clunking solenoids. Maybe it is just the simple physics at the center of it all. I’m not really sure.  My kids, however, don’t share my enthusiasm. I suspect part of it is that they never wandered through a fog filled arcade in the middle of the night, hopped up on Reese’s Pieces with a shrinking pile of quarters in their pocket. The other part might be the fact that they have gotten used to the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox Kinect (we just got one last week).

Watching them jump up and down playing an extremely simple and repetitive game with the Kinect gave me an idea. I envisioned pinball projected on the side of my house, the kids jumping up and down in front of it to move the paddles. Keep reading to see how I plan to build it and what I’ve done so far. There’s a full video, but also text of the entire thing.
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Auto power circuit for an arcade machine

March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Some of the pinball machines which [Jeri Ellsworth] has restored have ended up in the break room at her work. We’re sure her coworkers are thankful for this, but sometimes they forget to turn off the power to the machines, and letting them run constantly means more frequent servicing will be necessary. She set out to fix the situation by building a circuit that will automatically power the machines.

We think the solution adds some much needed functionality. Instead of hunting for the power switch, you can now power the machine up by hitting the left flipper, and it will automatically shut off after about five minutes of not having that flipper button pressed. For this she grabbed a 555 timer chip and built a circuit to control the relay switching the mains power.

She added a magnet and reed switch to the left flipper switch assembly to control her add-on circuit. It connects to the base of a PNP transistor which controls a resistor network and capacitor. This part of the circuit (seen to the left of the 555 in the schematic) allows the timer to be re-triggered. That is, every time you press the flipper the 555 will reset the timer. Don’t miss the demo she filmed after the break.

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