A new week is kicking off, which hopefully means lots of exciting changes to come for PINBOT 2.0 over the next seven days. I’ve decided to start putting together a small “developer diary” of the progress for people to read and follow along with. Sometimes there will be images or videos to share. While at other times it will just be text. I don’t have any planned format for what I share – only that it will be broken down into the days of the week, where I document progress for each day. Ideally I’d love to be able to put up a post each week, but there will be periods where little to no work on the project is done. This means some posts may span several weeks – I’ll just see how it goes.
Monday 16/11/2020
First thing to look at today was adding flashers to the lamp shows in both the high score and bonus modes. I’ve opted to go with a simple top to bottom sequence for the high score mode. This repeats every 5 seconds. The bonus mode sequence will work in reverse, with the flashers activating from the bottom of the playfield to the top and sync with the insert light show that plays.
A somewhat boring task today was creating a script that packages together the “pinbot-recoded” folder for deployment to the production machine. Up until now, it’s been a manual process of deleting the old folder from a USB stick and copying the required folders across. It would be so much easier to just run a single command line (like “packagepb” for example), which did everything and removed all manual steps. I’m often using either LUA or PHP for my scripting since those are what I’m most familiar with. I decided to go with PHP in this case. The script didn’t take long to create and has a reasonable amount of logging and error handling for when things fail. I expect this will evolve as the project goes on.
