Progress 7/28/2014

I’ve decided to make the all of the titles of my posts completely boring.  Sorry.  Maybe I will feel a little more enthusiasm later in the post, but doubtful.

First order of business is that I built a rotisserie.  I started thinking that I needed one last week.  I wanted something that I could actually give the playfield some angle so that I could play a couple games if necessary.  I threw a sketch together and sent it to Joe, and he mentioned I was an idiot for trying to do it myself.  (My words, not his).  He sent me a link of a well thought out rotisserie that only took about an hour to construct.  What the posters didn’t mention is that you are going to spend about two hours at the local hardware store picking up all the materials, but that is mostly because I get to the nuts and bolts aisle and my eyes go all haywire.  Here is the link that Joe sent me.  https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/vids-quick-and-dirty-rotisserie-guide.  Fantastically simple to build, and it costs around $100 at today’s prices.  You could easily cut the price by $20 or $30 if you are willing to cut the threads yourself.

Here’s the things I’ve learned building the rotisserie.

• Either use a monkey wrench, or at least use a lever in the pipes torque the pipes together as much as possible.  I didn’t do that, and mine is wobbly.  It will be better when I pull the playfield off it and tighten it up, but I was too excited to use it.  (It was noted in the instructions, I just didn’t follow them).
• I’m going to add wood blocks to the pieces of angle metal that hold the playfield.  Using blocks will allow me to adjust them to places on the playfield that have no components.  Making them out of wood means that I can power the playfield and not worry about it shorting out to the metal rails.  (I don’t think it was envisioned as powering it on the rotisserie, but since I only need a single 24 pin Molex power connector, it is very convenient for me to power it there.  It also makes it easy solder on the back and hopefully debug issues.)

After finishing the rotisserie, it was on to powering the playfield.  The end design uses the Raspberry Pi to turn the power supply on and off.  It powers the solenoid boards/input boards with 5VSB from a PC power supply (which is always on).  I tried powering it and just hard wiring the 48V power supply on.  The problem is that it takes about 100 ms for the processors to come up and do power on self tests, and during that time, the FET inputs are floating.  Not a problem in the real system, but it is annoying to hear the click at startup.  I ended up hooking up a wall wart for the 5VSB supply so that I can plug in the wall wart, then turn on the big 48V supply.

After initially turning on the board, I immediately blew out the fuse that I had for the flippers.  I’m missing something on how Game Plan configured their flippers.  I assumed one thing, and evidently that was wrong because I blew the fuse.  Spent a little time tonight debugging it, but didn’t get any closer.  I had it working well for a little bit, but it wasn’t at full strength.  As soon as I tried to make it at full strength I started having problems.

At one point last night, one of the solenoids started chattering.  It could be that I had a ground loop, but I couldn’t reproduce it tonight.  Originally the return to the wall wart had to go through the PC power supply to get back to ground.  (Again, not what would happen in the real system, but right now I’m cobbling a little bit of stuff together.)  I added a ground return line to the wall wart so ground would be connected properly.

So here is the first video of firing the solenoids on Sharp Shooter 2.  The pop bumpers sound really nice and crisp.  The flippers are weak because how they were hooked up.  I was only powering the hold coil of the flipper.  http://youtu.be/5w517evHcOE.

I just looked up the resistance on the flipper coil.  It is a 5008B and only has 1.2 ohms of resistance.  No wonder the original machine could run off 24V.  If that is the case I need to cut down the initial kick and hold significantly.  I was running originally running at 48ms initial kick, and 25% sustain, but I’ll try cutting it down to 16ms initial kick and 6.25% sustain.  That is definitely the strongest flipper coil I’ve ever seen.

Progress 7/14/2014

I’ve been working on the GenPyCode project in the Google code repository, and  rewiring the SharpShooter II playfield.  Progress is slow but steady.

Starting with the rewire of SharpShooter II.  The initial step is to get all the solenoids firing and active on the playfield.  Because the driver boards can statically configured, it is simple to set them up so the machine will be playable.   The machine won’t play a game, but will continually serve the ball onto the playfield, all the bumpers will work, the kickout hole will work, and I’ll probably daisy chain the drop targets so you need to knock down all of them to have the bank reset.  The end game will support two ball multiball, but that would take a bit of programming.

Right now, I’ve routed many of the wires that source and sink the 48V for the solenoids.  The 48V source is brought to the playfield using three lines:  upper playfield solenoids, lower playfield solenoids, and flippers.  Four wires are used to return the current from the two solenoid cards.  Three wires are used to source the current for the lighting.  The playfield GI was originally broken into two circuits.  A third circuit has been added to source the current for the feature lights.  Looking at the current rating of the wires, I’m definitely over doing the number of wires, but it allows for me to the ground wires on the back of the playfield.  (Less soldering for me to do.)

The feature lights for Disaster are going to use LEDs.  Since this is a retrofit, the feature lights are incandescent bulbs.  While the driver that I made was OK for individual LEDs (about 20 mA), an incandescent bulbs need approximately 200 to 250 mA.  That of course means that the original design will not work to sink that much current.  I’ve sketched out the new design for the drivers, which requires an individual MOSFET for each feature light bulb.  The serial register also needs to have open collector outputs so that the FETs can  be used as high side switches and the existing common ground returns can be reused.  The parts for the new drivers are ordered from Mouser.  I just need to get off my butt and layout the driver cards and order them.  I’m sure that I can fit the design on a 5 cm x 10 cm PCB, so  a single order will give me 20 PCBs.

Onto GenPyCode updates.  The GenPyCode Python project takes the simpleRules.txt file and generates the Python files necessary to run the pinball machine.  This is then run using the PinballFramework to operate the actual machine.  I originally did a lot of the code using Java, but since the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have perfect support for Java, I decided to rewrite it using Python.  Since then, the Python version has been significantly updated and more features added.  I’m now going back and adding the newer features into the simpleRules.txt.  It also adds features for more debuggability.   It currently creates python files for solenoid bits, input bits, and LED bits.  It also creates the constants for the sound files.

Next steps will just be continuing in the same vain.  I’m hoping to finish the wiring on SharpShooter II and then take a video.