I know some people have done skeeball machines with Arduino and raspberry pi, but I'm still lost and confused..
I have a Skeeball Lightning machine with a dead display and PCB so I'm wanting to put in an Arduino, pi, solenoid for releasing the balls, and an lcd for score/ball display.
I am completely clueless when it comes to this stuff so any help would be greatly appreciated because my kid is about to have a fit over this thing not working.
This is a challenging project, but you should be able to pull it off.
-- Software
There are several skee-ball software packages currently available.
RandyT from GroovyGameGear released a version, as did several other BYOAC skee-ball builders.
(list of builds
here)
Your choice of software will dictate hardware choices such as whether to use a keyboard-style encoder or a gamepad-style encoder.
-- Ball release solenoid
This will be a problem, unless you can find software that already supports it.
You may need to rig an override switch, manual bypass, or just disable the ball catch.
-- Inputs
Running the sensors through the GPIO pins on a Pi is possible, but those are 3.3v inputs.
The sensors on your machine are probably running on 5v.
With that in mind, you're probably better off using an "active low" encoder like IPac, KeyWiz, etc. (NOT an "active-high" ZD Encoder)
This machine uses the light sensors for ball detection... Not sure if that makes a difference or not.
There are two basic types of optical sensors: beam break and reflective.
- Beam break works with any type of ball that blocks the IR beam.
- Reflective only works with certain types of balls.
The good news is that the sensors and balls work together on your system, so you should be able to wire the sensors to an active low encoder.
Disclaimer: I've only worked with beam break sensors. The reflective sensors
should also work, but may need to be wired differently.
Scott