Hello!

[CMoates]

Adam told me about this group so I wanted to introduce myself and say
hello.

I've been doing a bit of Arduino work lately, on things totally
unrelated to pinball. But naturally, as a pinball enthusiast, I've had
it in the back of my mind that I'd love to work on a pin project of
some sort.

I am thinking for my initial project that I'm going to take on a Game
Plan cocktail. It's smaller, simpler, and uses LED displays. But in
the end, I'd like to control a DMD machine, I think.

I looked through some of the old posts, and it seems everyone has a
different take on the best way to approach this problem. Visual Basic
is an interesting one, as it's easy to write for, generally speaking.
But personally, I'm an open source guy, so running Windows in my
pinball machine isn't at the top of my list.

Ahyhow, just wanted to introduce myself, and see who still is working
on things here. Any advice for someone who still has a mostly clean
slate to work from?

Cheers,
Chris

[poodull]

mono runs on linux.

http://mono-project.com/Main_Page

I'm building a pinball machine from scratch. Game logic is in C#,
display is flash, IO control will (hopefully) be arduino (sanguino).

I need a lot of help in that last part, so I'll be paying attention to
your posts, Chris.

fc

[Adam Preble]

Somewhat on the topic of languages, I'll toss in a bit of my
experience. As a warning, I don't have much of a point here, but
hopefully this will provide some meaning to someone reading.

About a year ago I was working on controlling our Whirlwind with an
Arduino's I/O ports wired in place of the CPU chip. So the Arduino
would parse a very simple command language ("c01!" == pulse coil 1)
and send back a stream of switch updates ("s23+" == switch 23 closed),
basically acting as a serial-based translation interface to the CPU
board's address lines. This part worked well. I needed to do more
with debouncing but otherwise it worked.

I wanted to use Ruby for my game logic, and had worked up a nice
pseudo-language with Ruby's anonymous blocks (similar to how Rakefiles
work). Running Ruby 1.9 on my Powerbook G4 at the time was just too
slow to do things like operate the pop bumpers. I ended up having to
hack in special cases for those into the Arduino code I'd written to
fire the pop bumpers on switch contact.

Just did some checking on the Sanguino (and the Arduino Mega!) — woah.
Those boards would be a *lot* better suited to what I was trying to
do at the time. I was really scrounging for I/O pins before... 13 vs
32 and 54, respectively. Wish they'd bump the speed a bit, too... if
memory serves there wasn't too much extra time between running the
switch and lamp matrixes and sending out the serial updates.

Adam

[Eli Curtz]

I haven't gotten one to check out yet, but the teensy++ http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html
looks like it might be really good for anyone familiar with the
Arduino.

Arduino IDE compatible.
46 I/O pins.
Really cheap.
Real USB on the microcontroller. I'm not sure how much this is true,
but I've gotten the impression that the actual Arduino boards are
somewhat hampered as far as communication speed due to everything
relying on serial transfer from the FTDI chip.

Gerry's FPGA I/O board looks more impressive with each update as well.
Anyone working on a conversion should definitely keep up on his
progress.

I just finished a little more cleanup on my modular driver board -
I'll probably order a few from BatchPCB at some point . Eagle files
available if anybody wants a starting point for making an Arduino
shield or something.

- eli

[Mole]

Hello to all! New to this group but not to the idea of making my own
themed pin.

Question for group: What do think about Coconut Island's approach with
the I-pac4 with dual usb interface? What is the down side with going
that route?


Dan

[kendall...@gmail.com]

Hello all. Since this seems to be the board conversation here is my
input.

I'm using multiple boards for different functions.

I've gone solely with Ultimarc products. They are developed for MAME
projects but they work well here.

IPAC for switches
PacDrivers for Lamps
UHID for solenoid Drive

Pac Drivers could also be used for the solenoids I just happened to
have the UHID too. The UHID's circut controls the + current out
rather then the ground so driving a FET is a lot easier with it.

I'm programming in VB