Episode 607 Reboot request

You may need to start by sharing some pictures of the version of the game that you are after creating, as they vary quite a bit.

Over here in my youth it was known as the 'Donkey Derby' but that I believe that was a copy of George Valentine Tonner's 'Kentucky Derby' game. Some had animatronic horses on a Scalextric type track whereas some were pulled along by ropes wrapped around pulleys more like Lorrainbow's design. Some were controlled by rolling balls into pockets, and others by tapping switches alternately. Horses have been replaced by camels and rabbits as well.

You may need to start by sharing some pictures of the version of the game that you are after creating, as they vary quite a bit.

Over here in my youth it was known as the 'Donkey Derby' but that I believe that was a copy of George Valentine Tonner's 'Kentucky Derby' game. Some had animatronic horses on a Scalextric type track whereas some were pulled along by ropes wrapped around pulleys more like Lorrainbow's design. Some were controlled by rolling balls into pockets, and others by tapping switches alternately. Horses have been replaced by camels and rabbits as well.

I recall that some were based on linear tracks like Lorrainbow's Strava version whereas some were based on oval tracks.

Size varied a lot as well from the large arcade versions like this Blackpool Pier Entertainment - Donkey Derby to small table top toys like this Desktop Horse Racing Derby .

The ball-rolling ones tended to be at the larger end of to scale so not clear as to how large a build your were thinking of ?

6 foot long. Big enough for a family get together. Even a smaller size would be great.  I could make a simple roller ball game. Drop a ball in and it hits a couple of pins on the way down to the points holes -like a pachinko machine.

Yes, my youth was filled with the same thing. Oh those were great times. Now we have n inept moron running our country. I presume you are in the UK?

What I really want is based on George Valentine Tonner's Kentucky Derby. I played that at the fairgrounds every year with my mom.

With Arduinos and programmable RGB's, it would be easy to have the lights advance instead of mechanical horses. I could use a laser cutter to cut out the horses in a row and cover them with colored plastic.

The lights would be behind the cutout illuminating the horses as they advance. They would advance when the ball hits one of three switches to gain points. 

The patent was quite brilliant on your part. As my friend would say "I'm chuffed!" I think that's the correct saying. 

We managed to leave politics off this forum. Let's keep it focused on engineering.

The user interface probably the main size restriction if it is mechanical. A 6' long track would probably fit 2 people either side if you are rolling balls, or perhaps 3 either side if you are using some sort of pinball mechanism with less arm movement involved.

How many players and how deep a table were you thinking ? The roll a ball design usually requires that the pockets aren't  reachable at arms length to avoid cheating, but you could have some sort of a clear cover above the pockets to make sure the balls to have to be rolled in.

Yes, UK. 

LEDs would be a lot easier than a mechanical solution, but perhaps not so good in daylight. It would also limit the resolution of the track to the number of horse cut-outs. A 3" long horse on a 6' track would give you 24 positions from start to finish whereas a mechanical version would give you near infinite positions. Depends if you want to scale the game play on the number of points collected or on the distance travelled per point.

With an Arduino controlling this you could have penalty/bonus options appear on certain pockets that speed up or slow down the movement of the player's horse. Perhaps borrow some of the game play features from pinball games to spice it up a bit. If you light the legs separately from the rest of the horse you could perhaps flash them red to indicate an injury penalty is active.

Were you thinking of a single row of horses being lit with different colours to indicate player position or multiple rows with a row for each player ? 

If you use clear plastic for the horses you could try edge lighting the horses from below. Can work well with engraving.

You could use RGB LED rings around the pockets to provide animation and game play feedback.

I've seen some of the horse cars up for sale from the original carnival games, which would just require a Scalextric type track to run them on. They may be a bit on the large side.   

Oh yeah. I like lighting the holes. There are 12 rows of horse for 12 players. I can make horses smaller to add more. That's easy enough. Penalty holes would make it interesting but it would take longer to play.

The Scalextric idea sounds fun for a home or carnival game but how would I get the horse to move a specific segment and start or end with a winner?  How would that work?

I can build a slot car track from scratch. I have a track here. If you're interested,  I would like to explore this idea using the HO scale track and I'll create the horse miniatures for it. Thanks. 

If you look at the original rabbit design patent it had a segmented power rail which was energised by a rotary switch turned by the balls. The motor would run until the end of the energised segment whereby it would lose power until the next segment was energised.

You could use a timer in the microcontroller to energise the track for a certain period of time. However motors tend not to run the same so you may need to calibrate them a bit. This could be automated by timing the length of time it takes for each horse to run the length of the track and then adjust the timing to make them all match the slowest horse. A bit of randomness in this type of game is perhaps not a bad thing as real world horses run at different speeds.

You could make the horses more intelligent so that the wheels have feedback sensors so they only turn a certain number of times for each segment when the track is energised. Although this wouldn't account for traction slippage. You get motors with built-in encoders.

You could put feedback sensors into the track so the microcontroller will know when a segment has been completed and remove the power.

You could use a sensor to measure the distance from the start line / end line to the horse and energise the track until a set distance has been reached. Time of flight might work if you can find one of a suitable range for your track (50mm to 1200mm Could use both start and finish sensors to double the range).

Mikeatencio said:

I can build a slot car track from scratch. I have a track here. If you're interested,  I would like to explore this idea using the HO scale track and I'll create the horse miniatures for it.

This might be a fairly quick way to get going as I expect you can buy the ready-made slot car chassis and then 3D print the horse to go on top at an appropriate scale.

Looks like you can get some electronics for them as well, which may be a quick way to make for more advanced control.

Perhaps start off by looking out for projects involving interfacing slot cars with Arduino. Here is one using hall effect sensors around the track to detect the position of the car to trigger a change in speed: Playing Slot Cars Against an Arduino   

Mikeatencio said:

I could make a simple roller ball game. Drop a ball in and it hits a couple of pins on the way down to the points holes -like a pachinko machine.

Perhaps also take a look at Skee Ball type arcade game projects for ideas ?

Automatic Scoring for a Small Skee-Ball Game

Homemade Skeeball Game