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Your Customized Pinball Kit

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element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

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Mini Pinball Kit
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The Ben Heck Show team has been working on designing the mechs for the Mini Pinball Kit. Pinball games contain bumpers, ramps, additional flippers, drop targets, various displays, flashing lights, and habitrails. Designing a kit where mechanisms can be placed in various configurations can get tricky. We want the kit to be capable of as many configurations as possible, BUT we might have to narrow down which mechanisms are included in the kit. So we thought we'd consult you. What are your favorite mechanisms to be included in a pinball game? What would you like to see included in your kit? Do you have other ideas for the kit? Share in the comments below!

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  • May need to revisit the intended target audience here.

     

    Is the kit going to contain everything you need to assemble it into a working pinball machine in the box (e.g. fun project for kids), or does it just contain the key components and the user needs access to a workshop/fablab in order to fabricate additional parts (e.g. people who want to design their own games). Will there be a supply of add-ons and spares available ?

     

    It may be difficult to include features like habit rails in a totally free-form design unless you expect the audience to have excellent wire bending/forming skills. An alternative might be to consider something like plastic flexirails as used in the Fischertechnik pinball build

    fischertechnik GmbH - ROBOTICS - ROBO TXT ElectroPneumatic

    and their dynamic ball track builds

    fischertechnik GmbH - PROFI Dynamic - Dynamic L2

    which can be cut to length and formed as required but you still have the issue of requiring custom supports to hold it in place.

     

    More realistically I suspect you would need to have a tried and tested design which includes a pre-formed habitrail component and it is either used or isn't. However having a kit with lots of left over components depending on the core design chosen, will likely bump the overall cost up.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I was imagining the habitrails were the bits that guide the ball to the flippers (which is actually an "inlane"), as opposed to the wire "tube" in which the ball would roll.

     

    This is a great resource for the uninitiated (which includes myself image )

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_pinball_terms

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