Arduino Skeeball Controller

[MotoGP]

I own a couple Skeeball Machines Model S.  The CPUs are getting really hard to find and very costly to repair.  Mine currently work but looking ahead what will I do if/when they stop?

I'm recovering from back surgery and going crazy watching TV etc  so I started working on coding an Arduino Uno to use as a controller.  I'm curious if anyone else has interest in this project?

I plan to make it function like the original game, it will drive 3 5" 7-Segments for the score and a 3" - 7-segment for the ball count.  I want to have it drive the original displays too but that requires a bit of reverse engineering to understand the signature of the serial data sent to the displays.  The plan is to use the original wiring in the machine so rewiring is not needed.  It will also control the ticket dispenser.  Since I plan to use original wiring,  it will of course use the wire switches for scoring and ball count.  If there is interest in this, I can tweak the program to use the  Adafruit 3mm beam sensors.

Most likely I'll use a microSD card to save settings and highscore.

The lights, top flasher and solenoid will be driven by a SainSmart 8-ch solid state relay board.  Using solidstate relays as they are silent compared to regular mechanical relays.

Speaker will be drive by Adafruit Mp3 Shield. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1788


Here is picture of the little prototype setup for testing out the code.

[baritonomarchetto]

Nice project, I am definitely interested (even if skeeball has never been popular here in Italy)
 Keep us posted

[MotoGP]

this project is coming along nicely, had a lot of free time over the holidays to grid out some code.

I changed the Arduino to a Mega as I need a couple more i/o. It controls the original Display and ticket dispenser.
Currently it will run a complete game, keep score, issue tickets, idle mode with rotating display. I added a 8ch solid state relay board to control the ball release, flasher and the lights.

I have not decided how to setup the programming of the settings yet. Next is to add the mp3 shield to the Arduino and add some sound!
The clear plastic case is for a Raspberry PI, I plan to port this code over to Python as I have other ideas that are not feasible with Arduino. The Arduino will be an inexpensive setup to play the classic game.

I plan to design a case for the Arduino and relay board to be 3D printed.

[baritonomarchetto]

It would be nice to have some additional info/pics of the skeebal hardware.
Again: not something popular here around, but a nice project on the arduino side

[fgalatis]

Any possability of sharing your code?