When I set out on my journey to develop a 2.0 project with PINBOT, I hadn’t expected there to be an 8 month gap between my initial post and this one. I found myself busy with many projects last year (in and outside of pinball) which ended up seeing virtually no progress made. I had started to recreate the rule set of PINBOT in MPF, but that didn’t get much further than setting up some files. I may still do this once the project progresses far enough along as I’d love to set this up like Bride of Pinbot 2.0 from Dutch Pinball and let the player select between old and new rule sets. Two games in one is a big win when you consider how much space our machines take up. At the end of last year I was getting the urge to give this project more attention over the Christmas break and into 2020. In December, work was tossing out a lot of old hardware. I will need a PC to run my game on when hooked up to my Pinbot machine, so a freebie sounded like a good starting point.
Pinball
Documenting my adventures into pinball repair and restoration
My Jurassic Park received HUGE play time over the Xmas and new year period. I’ve been loving my Jurassic Park so much, I decided to upgrade a few elements of it. I also had an issue pop up with the flipper coil stops, which i’ll cover here too. First up though is a sound upgrade. I love how PinSub enhanced the sound on my Black Knight: Sword of Rage. So much so that I had to have one for Jurassic Park. The kit is simple to install
Not long ago, Starship Fantasy reproduced the large helmet plastic for Bride of Pinbot. When some became available through their distributor here in Australia, I didn’t hesitate to order one for my game. The box then sat on my shelf for a number of months, patiently awaiting the day I’d get around to actually installing it. Finally, that day had come. The original helmet in my game isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly showing signs of age along with some small sections broken where it attaches to the playfield. Since I had put so much effort into the rest of the game, it felt wrong not to grace the Bride with a new helmet.
So close to the end now on Dracula. Time to check the final things off the to do list and get the game ready to go home. Something worth doing on all your games is replacing the batteries on the main board with a remote battery pack. This means any leakage will be kept away from the board and you’re only need to replace a $3 part. I build these myself, with all parts purchased from Bunnings (for the wooden dowel) and Jaycar (for the rest).
Something that has been on my “TO DO” list for awhile now is to create an animated LED strip mod for the flail ramp on my Black Knight: Sword of Rage PRO pinball machine. On the Premium and LE models, the lightning bolt cutouts on the metal ramp are lit from below the playfield with 2 strips of addressable LED’s. These are then animated by code in the game, allowing the programmers to play different patterns based on the active rules. The PRO model does not have these LED’s and it’s left black. I purchased a mod from Mezel Mods many months ago that adds 2 LED strips below the ramp BUT they are not animated. Instead all LED’s can only be the same colour and the animation support is limited to fade, solid or blink. You’re also limited to a selection of 15 or so colours. I want to make something much more interesting (and cheaper) so have decided to use an Arduino board to control 2 addressable LED strips so I can animate them. I won’t be able to hook them up to the game code and animate them in the same way as on the Premium and LE games, but I can perhaps use the state of the flail to change the animation. I see this as a good exercise in exploring Arduino and how I may be able to use it in my Pinbot 2.0 project. First up, an Arduino Uno board and case were ordered.
