The Fireball Pinball machine is a 1976 game, which Ian bought in a very unloved state for a couple of hundred dollars. Using a Pi, he’s dragged it into the 21st century. Ian says:
The basic system design has the Pi as an i2c master with the following functions:
reading switches from the lamp / switch Arduino when that slave pulls an interrupt pin hi (read by Pi GPIO after a level shifter)
sending commands to the lamp / switch Arduino to turn on / off specific lights
sending commands to the solenoid driver to fire specific solenoids
Gameplay tracking – players, balls, scores, bonus
Background music
Game event sounds
HD GRAPHICS!
(Your average pinball machine in 1976 did not have HD graphics. Or any graphics at all. And it did not have 512MB of RAM.)
Read more here and check out Ian’s blog for lots more about the Fireball HD project!
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