There has been a bit of discussion in another thread about scratch built pinball machines. Some have asked about progress........so here I go. I'm the process of building two of them for twice the crazy. One is 'Alien Insurrection' and is based on the Alien franchise (mostly the first two movies) and the second is 'Impending Doom' which is based on Invader Zim.
They are both based on the P-roc hardware to handle all lamp/switch/coil/etc events and Beaglebone Blacks for the brains of the operation. The Beaglebone Black and some Raspberry Pis will talk over an ethernet switch for offloading some of the audio/effects and embedded LCD playfield panels. I might just use I2C communication but we'll see. Still deciding if I'll have a DMD on Alien Insurrection or not and Impending Doom will not have one. Both machines will have LCD panel "backglass".
As for progress there isn't much to display at the moment as it's mostly just python code using the pypinproc library, lots of notes, playfield design experiments, some playfield toys, boxes of parts and thoughts scattered around in my brain.
A bunch of Molex connectors from Mouser should be here tomorrow so I can start wiring up the main boards. The python main engine is running and am currently working on the modes and general switch/lamp mechanics. Hopefully I'll have "first flip" this weekend or next on a whitewood.
Ramps will be vacuum formed along with hydro dripping for some of the parts. Trim and legs will be powder coated. I've not done any of these things before so it should be quite a mess.
Anyways, this will be a “slow-burn” for progress and pics/vids will be posted now and then when there is sumthing worth showing. I doubt people would want to see a screen shot of my subversion repository with checkins. And that is about all it's been for the past several months.
Some pics of stuff below......then my camera battery died.....and my camcorder battery is deader than Elvis. Sigh.
The lab of DOOM!
The beginnings of insanity:
Beaglebone Black with Audio Cape, P-roc, PD-LED, Power Driver 16, Zeb's DMD power, Plasma DMD
More power!
Power supply for P-roc and toys, containers of parts and toys, coil power supply and some flipper assemblies
More toys for playfield, lcd panels, 16 “port” relay and other misc stuff, in back you'll see containers full of posts, inserts, wire connectors, lamp covers, etc