flipper success

3d printed a chunk of the lower third, attached my solenoid (kept tweaking the linkages) and I got pretty good action.  Still not going to be able to make my own shafts but luckily I found a robot shop that sells 1/4" shafts in various lengths with a flat on one side, and just $3 each (those are on the way).  So because I had some success, I'm continuing to creating a basic whitewood.  While I tested the solenoid directly attached to playfield, I'm going to be making brackets so the positions will be repeatable.  I have a stash of siderails (ironically I ordered a bunch of 1/4 x 1/2" ABS strips for another project that are the perfect size).

Pretty sure my ball trough is going to work, I have a concept for the shooter rod (placeholder at the moment).  Pretty sure I know how I'm going to do slings as well.

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Already thinking ahead of other things I need for this to work including an accurate cabinet angle (I think a lot of scale pinballs tend to keep the same angle and the ball travels too fast).  I'd like it to play as close to full scale as possible.  Also because I'd like this to be a legitimate homebrew category that could possibly have tournament play, it needs the ability to nudge.  There's an obvious issue with that as this being half scale even though you could install a tilt bob, I think it's going to be hard to scale your strength nudging the same with a much lighter game.  What I was thinking of doing (especially since this is likely going to a tabletop game without legs like the 30's bar games) is mounting the back on a lazy susan so the whole machine pivots, and then the front can slide side to side but I put stoppers in the bearing so it can't rotate more than like 5 degrees either way (it will likely still need some sort of general nudge detection so you can only do it once every minute)

For my first whitewood I'm likely going to just get a full scale paper printout to mark all my cuts and holes, but I do have a used CNC machine in the garage I need to get setup that would make this far easier.

solenoid didn't work like I planned

https://youtu.be/R2kgjilRSOg

Was going to buy a bigger coil (more stroke, larger 4mm hole) but realized the coil is twice the size (almost as big as a real pinball coil) so I cancelled my order.  I'm going to try to make these smaller coils work so I bought some M2 screws and nuts.  I think I just need to mechanically get it to work (smooth rotation, the right torque arm, etc).

Also the flats I ground on the dowel pins were a bit sloppy.  Started out pretty good, the metal started to warm up and make the 3d printed fixture soft, which made the pin turn.  I think I need to try again, and either pause after grinding a single spot, or keep a spray bottle handy to cool it down.

HSP parts printed

Parts are coming together.  half scale flipper bats (added a groove where I intend to use an o-ring for flipper rubber).  Screw taps into a flat on the shaft.  There's coil arms above that.  The black piece is a fixture to hold the dowel pin while I manually grind a flat with a bench grinder.  If it works out well, I'll probably just farm it out to an online CNC company but I want to test it out before I commit to ordering a higher quantity of shafts to get a decent price break.  The shaft bushings are 3d printed (fit is good).  One blue coil came today (I ordered a pair, but had to order them separate because amazon does that weird thing where if you order at the same time it gets delayed a week).

I'm 3d printing a chunk of the playfield to test.  I know I could just drill a couple holes in a piece of plywood but I don't have a home depot close by (and I just want to do a quick test).

half-scale homebrew

So I'm sure you've seen people build them on youtube.  it's usually some guy in a european country.  There's one channel where the guy is building a bunch of scaled down remakes (whitewater, world cup soccer 94, medievel madness).  You know what sort of sucks about all those projects?  You'll never get to play them, and you'll probably never get to build one yourself.  Think about it, every time you see someone build one, what's missing from you building one too?  The mechs.  Yea, nobody is making half scale mechs, nobody is even sharing their CAD designs.  I've pondered designing one for years, always thinking "man, it's going to be tough to scale everything down".. Everything from mechs, to even the hardware and and thicknesses in general all scaling in half.  This week I've done some designing and now that I'm confident it will work I've bought some parts (small 12v solenoids, buttons, some UHMW for the side rails, some dowel pins for the flipper bat shafts).  I plan to get flippers working, then I've got a design in mind for the slings.  Eventually I'll get to gobble holes, VUKs, pop bumpers but for now I just want to get a game flipping (make sure the solenoids I picked can launch a ball up a playfield and up a ramp).

If it works well, I'd like to share the designs (since EVERYONE seems to have a 3d printer these days).  I think it would be so neat if I kicked off a whole new homebrew genre where people are bringing mini pinball games to shows, maybe even get kids interested in making their own (I think a half scale pinball is far more manageable than a full scale 220lb pinball machine).

Why do I want to start one now?  Well, it's small and light.. it takes up very little space (something I don't have a lot of at the moment).. I could build it, and it could literally get stored in a closet.  I just finished a side project at work for a trade-show display (not pinball related, but still a lot of work building a box with lights and relays and water pumps).  One of our team members jokes about a pinball machine themed around our business for the booth, to which I informed him just how tied I am into pinball.  He's the sort of person that never really follows through on anything (IE likes to spout off ideas, but never wants to execute them).  So I'm just going to build one and surprise him (and my boss).  Building it half scale makes it VERY shippable.  Like no freight for sure, in fact at half scale I may even get it down to carry-on luggage size and weight.

Right now here's a rough layout.  I'm printing flipper parts as we speak, should get my components from Amazon tomorrow then I'm going to try wiring up the flippers and see how it does.

backup pinball themes

 Had a short tag team with my wife this weekend (we're helping a surgery recovering father get back to being independent which is hampering me getting stuff done).  So last night I decided to just start playing songs from a band I wouldn't mind seeing into a pinball theme someday.  This isn't the first time, last few times I tried to spitball ideas it just sort of fizzled out but this time it just worked.  In fact the more looked at the lyrics and watched the videos more ideas just popped into my head.  What band is it?... Genesis.  Yea, wrap your mind around that one.  Besides being an iconic 80s band, many forget just how much influence Phil Collins had to do with the sound.  If you haven't seen it, watch this Vox video from a few years back:

https://youtu.be/Bxz6jShW-3E

How does that turn into a pinball layout?  Easier than you might think (and re-using several of the targets and bash toy for nearly every song).  Not going to put in any actual work at this point, but going to throw all my notes into a folder for a someday.

unplugging sparked creativity?

 So my father-in-law had a fall 2 months ago, and since then he's had spine surgery, recovered from pneumonia, went into rehab (which did a horrible job, in fact it was a waste of time), and has now been back home for about a week slowly trying to get back to normal (he had a couple episodes where he almost went into a coma because of low blood sugar because he's on like 15 pills and doctors aren't great at tracking that stuff).  My hope is that my tag teaming with my wife being there basically 24/7 to make sure he's stable fades off and I can get back to normal life.  Since I've had no access to my computer, I actually took one of my 3d printers to their house so I can keep doing print jobs for clients.

Since I had free time I decided to use it to sketch ideas on paper old school.  Sometimes I forget how important it is to just freely think out ideas without getting into detail.  Just kept sketching stuff on a new piece of paper (what if I did this?  I bet I could squeeze that feature under there).  I've got 2 upper playfields now, and I'm realizing just how many songs I can re-use on each (with a neat feature I'm surprised nobody has tried before).. AND on top of that, the shapes of the playfields ended up being the first letters of the band so I'm taking a nod from data east guns n roses.  I've never been so motivated to get back into it.. I can't wait to start showing some progress.

Homebrew is getting so good.. that makes it hard

 After seeing all the games at Chicago Pinball Expo this year it made me realize two things:

1. If you want your game to get noticed, if the theme isn't killer (big trouble in little china) you better have an interesting mech.

2. If you can't come up with a killer mech, your game should stand out as being very different from the standard pinball cabinet (2x scale, head-to-head).

I'm also realizing I may want to put my new theme on hold for a very good reason and go back to blue.  I think in most cases, your first homebrew isn't that great (there are some exceptions) and I want the other theme to really be executed well after getting a finished game under my belt.  I don't know that I'll have a cool mech, but I have been pondering the idea of an interesting cabinet.. one that will make homebrew tours to multiple shows way more feasible.  As an engineer, I always try to do small experiments to see if something is going to work out.. if I have some success, I scale it up.  I just made a prototype of something and I was sort of blown away by how well it worked (did the math of scaling up and the results were even better than expected).  After going through the cost of a cabinet (mostly hardware) for sure I want to design my own cabinet, and as long as I'm doing that I'm going to cost reduce it, simplify it, lighten it.

Secondarily, I need to just START.. Like I need to build a simple rotisserie, cut a piece of wood and start mocking up my playfield up again.  If you never start, you'll never finish.