Machino 3000 Postmortem

For my advanced pinball project I decided to try and make a table that would react to the pinball that was inspired by some of the bonus stages of the Pokemon ruby & sapphire pinball game. For this project I needed an arduino, unfortunately the arduino did not arrive until the day before the project was due so I did not get to add as much as I wanted to this pinball setup.

The one thing I tried to make sure the table would do was react to the ball. I did not want to directly use buttons, partially do to not having the materials, but mainly due to wanting to recreate the feel of the pokemon pinball game, where it feels like parts of the board are alive and not simply components. I managed to create a sensor with variable succes by using a library that checked capacitance between two ports of the arduino, and connecting the circuit to some tinfoil on the back. I also covered the ball in tinfoil and put some tinfoil connected to ground beneath the sensor on the back. letting the ball complete the circuit whenever it touched both pieces of tinfoil at the same time. As stated before this didn’t always work and the wires that connected the sensor often came loose. I also added a motorized arm to the playfield that would block the ball but did not have the time to program a pattern of movement so I just had it mainly controlled by a potentiometer.

While I think that the idea for the pinball table was interesting the fact the supplies came in late did not help with the design. The game did not have any visuals as well which probably did not help its case. Overall though I think I did ok for the amount of time I had (because of the late delivery).

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