Viewer Question: Simple Pinball

Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to buid a simple pinball machine with only a small microcontroller? The raspberry pi can act as a microcontroller, and I was wondering if it could run from the Pi. If not, could it run from an arduino? The machine would be very simple and would use LED's or a 2-digit display instead of a DMD or an LCD. The switches on the board would just add another led to light up, or for a couple more numbers would add on the display. Is this possible? I've been wanting to do this project, and I want to know if it can be done.

-Nick

benheck · Accepted Answer

There's a DIY pinball platform called P-ROC which replaces your old pinball machine electronics, or lets you build a new one. It needs a Linux PC to control. People have successfully used the Raspi for this.

colecago · Answer

Ben's board uses a chipkit which is Arduino compatible. It does use another processor, a parallax, which does the Audio and DMD. So I don't see why you couldn't just do it with the Arduino and no parallax processor if you offload the Audio and Video onto the Arduino, which wouldn't be so hard if using a small character display.