Introduction Pinball add-ons, mods and toppers are increasingly popular ways to customise your machine, enhancing their appearance or adding features not included by the manufacturer. While static add-ons can sometimes work perfectly well, creating something which interacts with the gameplay takes things to a whole new level. If, for example, you have an animated toy [...]
Introduction In the first part of this article, Todd Andersen showed us how to create a programmable pinball ball detector which can power an add-on or topper so that it reacts when a ball is sensed in a particular location. This operates using an infrared (IR) module to sense the ball, an Arduino Uno microcontroller, and [...]
Introduction In his new two-part article (Part One, Part Two), Todd Andersen shows us how to build a microcontroller-based pinball ball detector to trigger add-ons such as toppers or enhanced lighting effects. His article focuses on building a system around an Arduino Uno microcontroller but, as he explains, other microcontrollers can be used instead. In [...]
Shortly before the start of Pinball Expo last month, Pinball News paid a visit to the Palatine home of American Pinball to see what had changed since our previous visit twelve months earlier. The American Pinball and Aimtron building in Palatine, Illinois The building on South Hicks Road is shared with American Pinball’s parent company, [...]
A Dozen Methods for Removing Damaged Hardware Introduction This article is an update to a previous Pinball News Pinball Tools article, and is presented to you in four parts: General Hand Tools, Electrical and Electronics Tools, Soldering Tools, and Damaged Hardware Removal with this, Damaged Hardware Removal, being the final part of the series. From [...]
Introduction This article is an update to a previous Pinball News Pinball Tools article, and is presented to you in four parts: General Hand Tools, Electrical and Electronics Tools, Soldering Tools, and Damaged Hardware Removal with this, Soldering Tools, being the third. As with the first two parts, my perspective comes from someone who is [...]
Introduction This article is an update to a previous Pinball News Pinball Tools article, and is presented to you in four parts: General Hand Tools, Electrical and Electronics Tools, Soldering Tools, and Damaged Hardware Removal with this, Electrical and Electronics Tools, being the second. As with the first part, my perspective comes from someone who [...]
Introduction This article is an update to a previous Pinball News Pinball Tools article, and is presented to you in four parts: General Hand Tools, Electrical and Electronics Tools, Soldering Tools, and Damaged Hardware Removal with this, Hand Tools, being the first. My perspective comes from someone who is a homeowner, a professional electronics technician, [...]
Back in 2019 we paid a visit to the Multimorphic factory in Round Rock, Texas. Since then, much has changed, both with the company itself and with the pinball industry as a whole, but the intervening four years have been good for Multimorphic, with new games launched, new personnel on board, and the P3 platform [...]
In his recent two-part article about making your own infra-red testers, Todd Andersen introduced the use of cheap microcontrollers to replace the discrete components used in his earlier design. He showed how microcontrollers can be programmed to provide more flexibility and more inputs/outputs than using discrete components. This led to the idea of using microcontrollers [...]