Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The Modern Firepower Pinball Project - Playfield Test [VIDEO]

Over the past few years of doing research and development, many times I have had doubts about my ability to build a pinball machine from scratch.

Occasionally a milestone is achieved, like the first time a solenoid is activated from a home-built power supply, or the first time a program you wrote recognized a switch input and energized a solenoid.

Each of these achievements gives you new confidence, but the doubts still linger in the shadows of your mind.  Sure, the individual tests were great, but what happens when you scale up to a full machine?

After a few months of careful assembly and wiring, I was finally able to put all of my doubts to rest.

In mid March I was able to play my first pinball game on my 'Modern Firepower' playfield, and the early results were fantastic.  I put together a multi-angle video to show off my hard work, I hope you like it.

Make the jump for the video...

In case the video does show below, here's a direct link:  http://youtu.be/q9fXIDC1NqU



A few notes:

  • I set the number of game balls to 15 instead of the normal 3 or 5, mainly because I was having too hard of a time getting all the balls locked for Multi-Ball with only a few balls.  Yes, I suck at pinball...

  • The software (my own Chameleon Pinball Engine) in use was at an early beta version, and had many issues that I've since resolved.  The current version of the software is vastly improved, though it is still receiving ongoing enhancements.  The software is running on a Windows PC and has a very interactive GUI for configuration.  I'll have some videos of the software soon.

  • No switches are connected directly to solenoids.  All switches are read through a U-HID USB device and processed by the software, which in turns triggers the solenoids through an LED-Wiz USB device. The response time in the video is good, but not great.  My current version of the Chameleon Pinball Engine software runs real-time, with no perceptible lag at all.

  • Since the playfield isn't in the cabinet yet, I'm actually using a Logitech wireless PC gamepad (looks like an XBox controller) to work the flipper buttons and other cabinet buttons.  It was pretty neat to control the pinball flippers wirelessly!

  • The rotisserie bracket that the playfield was mounted to blocked access to the top ball lock, so I wasn't able to install it.  In the video you will see me manually retrieving the ball when it gets stuck there.  Also, I'm manually triggering the 3rd ball lock (off camera with my gamepad) to get multi-ball action going.

  • When Multi-Ball starts, I'm manually adding the 3rd ball since the top ball lock isn't installed.  I'm not faking Multi-Ball, as the other two ball locks work correctly in the video.

  • The playfield is only sloped about 2.5 degrees in the rotisserie, so the ball gets up-field with a little more authority than you would normally expect.  The gentle slope also allowed the ball to get stuck in odd places.  The cabinet sloped the playfield at 6.5 degrees, so that changes the dynamics quite a bit.

  • There are only 3 cables connecting to the playfield:  The 50V power supply cable, the 12V/5V power supply cable, and the USB cable connecting to the PC.  The two power supplies are actually visible in the video to the lower left of the playfield.   If you had multiple playfields and only one cabinet, this 3-cable solution would allow you to swap playfields in about 5 minutes!

  • A couple of the sounds are from Firepower (I'm sure you'll recognize them), but the rest are from a famous pinball game that I'm sure almost everyone has played.  Props to the first person to correctly identify them (sorry Troy, you're disqualified since you already know).
 
One last teaser.  I recorded the video over a month ago, right before I installed the top ball lock and put the playfield into the cabinet. Since then I've spent a lot of time playing and updating my code.  Everything is so much better now (though still far from done).  While I have a lot more to show and share, I'm obviously distracted by playing pinball!

Sorry, but at least I'm having fun...

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