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Mini Pinball 03: Codemania! SoundFX and State Machines -- Episode 295

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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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It's time to code with Arduino and the Teensy 3.6 to create the game logic and sound for the Miniature Pinball machine. Using the C++ Programming language, Ben takes Felix's C code and makes it suitable for embedded microcontroller hardware with a logic state machine, this virtualised state machine monitors what is going on with the Pinball hardware, such as buttons and what the pinball touches, to react to it by increasing your score or playing music and sounds!

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  • That main loop bothers me, maybe it will be over polling to sense switch changes.  I would think a timer interrupt would allow even/regular polling of switches.  Individual states that take too long can be broken up into sub-states, that allow time to poll switches between the sub-states.  Shouldn't there be a halt instruction in there somewhere so the processor can go into a lower power state briefly when it has no work to do?  Maybe it will reduce electricity use and run cooler.

     

    Includes are mainly definitions.  I don't think they take up memory after compiling.  So including more than necessary doesn't hurt much.  Maybe there is a lint program that will tell you what isn't needed.

     

    How many processors will this pinball game need to run?  Can it be done with only one processor with efficient timer event driven code to save on costs?

     

    BTW, the archive list of shows now has episode 293 missing.

  • Nice episode.

     

    I would have preferred Ben do a quick drawing of the code design before he then jumped right into the details.

     

    He glossed over a lot of the design issues, which might have made it clearer when he cleaned up the code and broke the code into easier to maintain modules.

     

    DAB