Pinball

(Starship Troopers POV)

I loooooove pinball! Oh man, do I looooooove pinball!

A long long time ago, in a country on the other side of the world....

Yes, I've been playing pinball since I was a wee lad, I have fond memories of late 70's classics like Harlem Globetrotters, Evil Knievel, Kiss and of course, crazy 80's stuff like Centaur, 8 Ball Deluxe, Seawitch, Black Knight etc.. And just hold me back on the 90's pin memories.. Twilight Zone, Addams, X-Files, Jurassic Park, Godzilla, etc

Eventually, I made it to Pittsburgh in 2012 or 2013 for Pinburgh and PAPA, and obtained an international ranking which covid destroyed but hey, memories, and I can say I was internationally ranked (however poorly!)

   (PAPA HQ)
   (Ghetto flipper on a breadboard)

After you play pinball a lot, you suddenly think about building one. So wire up a flipper to an embedded Propeller CPU

   (POWER!)

Suddenly you are wiring multiple bench power supplies together.

   (Hey, I made those.)

Then you are designing custom PCB's to run it, welcome in, System Shock, the complete(?) pinball control system using RS485 at 10mbps.

  • Master - 128 switches, PIC32 control
  • Solenoid Driver - 32 drivers
  • RGB LED Driver - 64 invidually addressable LED's (WS2812)
  • PI Hat - RS485 Raspberry PI for Audio & Video
   (Pi Power)

And you drive it with a Raspberry PI

   (FastPinball Neuron Controller)

Then you procrastinate for many years and just buy premade electronics from FAST Pinball!