Building Simple (or not) Pinball Machine with RaspberryPi and/or Arduino

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doggmann
 
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Building Simple (or not) Pinball Machine with RaspberryPi and/or Arduino

Post by doggmann »

Hello!
First time poster, long time voyeur on adafruit and various platforms.
I teach engineering and architecture at a public high school in California. I'm just starting a Pinball Machine project with my advanced engineering course, Engineering Projects. I have students from computer science, architecture, engineering, and auto-tech classes as a culminating course to bring it all together and build weird things that solve a problem. This unit's problem - to create a themed pinball machine from wood and other materials we have access to, and programming it all with Raspberry Pi 3s or Arduino Unos. I have a stash of quite a few of these boards that are wanting a project.
We'll be looking into solenoids and other mechanics to make things move, but we want these machines to have some rules and scoring.
Frankly - I'm fairly new to coding (not really - I learned on hypercard and fortran way back in the 80s), and my electrical engineering knowledge is super-slow on recall. So my students are incorporating a ton of research and their own self-directed learning when it comes to solving their individual issues within their designs.
When it comes to pinball machines - I know there are driver cards out there (P-Roc, Fast, skeleton, etc.), but we won't have thousands of dollars to spend on our designs, limited budget is key to our designs. But I wonder if Adafruit has something we might want to look into to either increase our GPIO (an i2c chip, I'm told) or perhaps there is a driver board that would really help in our endeavors as we begin this journey into the world of pinball.

Not sure what my question is here, other than: anyone out there in Adafruit-world built a table-top pinball machine before? What kind of drivers or chips might we want to include in our research and planning? Any good sources for affordable solenoids and other mechanics that would kick a 3/4" steel ball bearing around?

Thanks so much - for all that you do!!
In my classes, I present an "Engineer of the Week" every Monday - and today I'm introducing them to Limor Fried with an old interview from Google Developers 9 years ago...
Adalady - please know you are a HUGE inspiration to my students and people around the world. THANK YOU.
Peter Parish
Tamalpais High School
Mill Valley, CA

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johnpark
 
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Re: Building Simple (or not) Pinball Machine with RaspberryPi and/or Arduino

Post by johnpark »

That sounds like a great class and a really fun project. One thing to check out for prototyping is one of the Crickit boards. You can use it to drive four 5V solenoids, as well as run some servos, motors, sound, and LEDs, and read eight sensors. It's not going to drive big 12V solenoids, but for a smaller scale test it would get them up and running quickly.

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