Hi everyone
My pinball fascination began with TBHS episode about it, since then, i was thinking about a way to make driver boards simplier (2+ microcontrollers and 3+ sd cards - it`s not a mess, but still too much if you ask me)
Solution i came up with: unification using Raspberry Pi - just make a driver board with a slot for Pi, then you have (with model B):
- 700mhz/512mb that is more than enough to drive everything in pinball (and it`s still not a PC, but embedded device, so it`s not an overkill)
- low level connections: 8 × GPIO, UART, I²C bus, SPI bus with two chip selects, I²S audio +3.3 V, +5 V
- 2xUSB, so you can extend driver connection capabilities (this idea came from P-ROC/P3-ROC)
- Ethernet for remote control, program management and other "bonus" features
- video output - maybe THIS is overkill, but i think this would be useful in some situations (like a multiplayer scorekeeping w/o multiple LED panels or color animations)
- 3,5mm jack - for me, that`s the simpliest way to stereo audio
- built-in SD card slot, so you can store all the needed data in one card (which is great, considering that`s cheaper and more failsafe than multi-card solution)
I think that`s a good idea, but i want to know your opinion about it.
P,S,: While i was writing text above, i found about Pi Compute Module and that`s even better, because all that`s needed to be soldered on main board is a single SO-DIMM slot