Ok first attempts to fire the ball started.  The end result is that I need to design a ball guide.  Surprisingly while I was worried that the ball would shoot forward and have to compensate due to the angle of the standard ball trough I was repurposing, instead shoots backwards a bit.  Tried to capture some ‘slow motion’ videos but the reality is, the ball moves pretty fast.

Here can see it go backwards a bit.

And from a more frontal view, can see the dent the ball is making into the wood.

So have been working on a ball guide. Tried printing a bunch of cones but most success was just a block of wood this morning. 

So, progress.. 

Ok have been bogged down trying to create subways (ramps underneath a playfield in pinball are called subways).  To feed a stock 8-ball trough that is normally used at a bottom of a playfield after your ball drains / it’s what stores all the balls.   I am using one in the center area to load up and then use as a ‘up-kicker’ to launch balls up through the hole in the lazy susan bearing I showed last time with the stepper motors.

The subways I designed were nearly too much for my Rigidbot 3D printer.. it has a 10x10x10″ build volume and the subways are about 11.5″ .. so took very creative placement to get them to print, and then had printer breakdowns, and trouble printing without warping, and it’s really hot in my garage in summer so limited interest.   But pushed through all that this weekend.

So the idea here is that this will be mounted underneath the central flat section, and the white subway will be under the top of one players playfield and the grey will be at the same point for the opposite player.

The Bottom here is just the stock part which has leave switches all along it.  This is so that it can count how many balls are loaded in at a time.   What isn’t shown here is the solenoid that will be mounted to fire the balls upward.  I’m upgrading the power of that solenoid to be stronger than the one used normally since we’ll need ~3-4″ of vertical height I think, but haven’t gotten much into that part yet as needed to get this sorted first.

I may very well remake this out of sheet metal.  I’m hoping I could use the CNC plasma cutter and sheet metal tools at makerplace to cut and then form these when the time comes.

Here’s a video of them showing that gravity works ok.

The pinball software framework I’m using didn’t yet have stepper motor support.  So in the last few weeks I’ve been working to glue a stepper motor board into the system.  Yesterday I got to the point where it’s in the framework and I got a unit test going.

The purple 3D printed gears mounted to a lazy susan bearing are the beginnings of the central mechanism that will be a 360 degree angry tiki ball turret.  

Now that some of the nuts and bolts are over with, it’s probably a good time to start talking about theme.   I have been considering it to be kind of explorers on a island that is controlled by a kind of tiki god sort of thing.  Perhaps with different boss levels for the different elements (lava, water, wind, earth) .. something of that nature.

With opportunities for both player vs player and player vs game/bosses.   I don’t have some elaborate game tree right now.. so , for the moment… what I can provide is a ‘vision board’ … one of those hippy things where you post a bunch of pictures and that’s supposed to provide some level of focus / inspiration.

Also, I am not an artist.. I have no idea how to execute the art on this thing.  Will be a learning experience for sure, if I don’t cave and hire a starving artist or something.

Inspiration #1 is the old Fireball Island board game.  We had this when I was a kid, and it was fun.. circa 1986.  The gist was getting to the top of the mountain where there was this statue where if you rolled a bad card a red marble was released and that would roll down different channels in the game and knock your pieces over.

Anyways, this is what I was thinking about.  And, on my game I hope to build a rotating head that can spit pinballs out.. that will be the first technical / build a mechanism type challenge.  But, again.. this is about vision, not implementation.

Other inspirations..

I found this image in a click bait article at the bottom of CNN or something.  Looks like it was stolen from some game called “Viking: War of Clans” per Google reverse image search

Additionally, I think also via some clickbait over to Atlas Obscura.. There are actually some real caves with cool faces all over it in Italy of all places.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-monsters-of-bomarzo

And last but not least, the Disneyland Enchanted Tiki Room

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten into it, but that’s the vision so far as it is.

Happy to report that my time at MakerPlace was successful.  After running some router bit calibration patterns, really didn’t have too many problems cutting out the Test Cabinet.

Changes I would make if i have to rebuild this at some point include:

• 2 Dowel rods as the cross members suck.. they spin and rotate.  If I’m going to be using a CNC machine anyway, could have easily cut out rectangular cross beams with “mortoise and tenon” joints.
• Software.. V-Carve seems like a pretty good tool to convert from a 2-D drawing to the CNC routers.  It is installed on all the laptops at Makerplace, but otherwise it’s a $800 package.  A pro and a con on what I did:
  • Pro: I downloaded the free trial and did all my jobs in it.  The free trial says it’s the full blown tool, it just can’t generate the output job.
  • Con: I thought I could take the free trial project file and open it in the license version at Makerplace and I would be ready in no time.  Not the case; the free trial was both a newer version than the ones in MakerPlace (so the file wouldn’t open) AND apparently, had the versions been right, I found out later that the trial files can only be opened on licensed versions installed on the same PC..  purposely preventing what I was trying to do I guess.   So, I had to regenerate all the files there on the spot during my precious machine reservation
• When you are rushing to regenerate all the steps, a checklist to include:
  • Material Thickness
  • Cut Depth
  • Generate Tabs – these are little pieces of wood left behind so the cut out pieces don’t fly off the table..  I forgot to do this, so some of my small pieces are very ugly as they got chewed up while trying to escape from the table
  • Ramps

Some videos of the action:

Initial Assembly of one side:

Since that weekend, I’ve actually made further progress.  I cut some holes (with a drill, like a pleb) for the flippers, gotten a table to setup the work in progress, and how to attach the 2 sides to the bridge so things don’t shift around.

Got the completed assembly for both sides

And now have flippers working on one side!   Just need to replicate for the other side.. and then onto actually making stuff for the playfields and ‘bridge’ area!