The Making of Fireball HD Pinball
– August 15, 2013Posted in: Featured Stories, Main Stories, Pinball
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Great write up, very interesting to read! Kudos on the successful project, hope to have a chance to try it out soon.
Flippers have two coils. There is a big coil that makes the flipper move, and then there is a small coil that is used to hold the flipper up if the button is held. Old pinballs used end-of-stroke switches to do this; newer ones (1990+ is new) did it in software.
You might be able to get away with PWM on the coil instead of using the separate winding.
Eric, we used the original coils and they do have end of stroke switches. We’ve discussed software activation of the flippers, but haven’t gotten to that idea yet. I suspect we will convert the switches over to 5 volt and build driver circuits like the ones we’ve built for the other coils. I’ll look into how they did it in the newer models – thanks for the tip.
Wow, this is great. I love Raspberry Pi and also integrated one into my pinball machines to do some cool stuff with the Dot Matrix Display – have a look at my website and Facebook, http://www.drpinball.co.uk.
I’ve seen your DMD extender in the past (on the website) and can’t wait to see what you do with the personal DMD 🙂
I am looking into restoring an old EM pinball table called Super Orbit. I have not done anything with the Arduino and was wondering if you could offer some advice on getting started. At the moment the pinball table will light up, and randomly will make its “launch” sound. That’s about all it will do. I have repaired switches, and I have even built my own MAME cabinet by hacking an old keyboard. I haven’t ever tackled anything this big before. Again, any help would be greatly appreciated.
hereThanks for the kind reply. Really impressive project you have t. I see a lot of hard work.
I look forward stopping in at the lab, as I live just several blocks away.
Until then-
Cheers!
DS
Hi
Great project well done!
If i was just going to do the sound, how might i do that? What would i need?
I have an old Electro Mechanical pinball machine and just simply wanted to look at pimping it up a boit, so that it would play different sound affects, and have a background music – a few other features.
What might i need to achieve this please?
There wil lbe no Outputs, other than may be ythe odd LED top let yo know if it reqasy to go.
Did yo have much trouble with latency between an input operating and a sound affecet call?
Howe many sound effects could be played siu,mltaneuosly, wit the background music going?
By the way, i don’t yet own a Pi, so would be starting from scratch.
Thanks
John
Hi Ian! What a strange coincidence. A couple of years back I started on a custom pinball machine project of my own. After months of looking for an old machine I could gut without any guilt I found a Bally Fireball! I had gotten the lights and switches working but I choose to use an off the shelf power driver board for the solenoids which I could never get working consistently. So the project got put on hold. I’m back on it and suddenly I see this blog! I am curious how well your solenoid driver board works and if you have even published its schematics? I have been working on a simple transistor based approach like you have but I keep blowing them up.
I’m building a pinball machine and need a high voltage solenoid to complete the internal hardware. I wasn’t sure what type is needed with the instructions that I have been following but I want to get a larger solenoid to give me the best charge in the machine. Hopefully, I’m doing this all right because I’m a first timer at building anything to this extent!
wow! This is amazing!