And it was electric…
This week we invested a lot of time into understanding the tech we will be working with this semester including working with multiple voltages, wiring a pop bumper, a flipper, and more!

Shockingly Easy to Pick up!

Here you can see Nightray screwing in our Pop bumper to an Arduino board. This demo allowed us to get an understanding of how pinball parts worked behind the scenes.

The Plan

We want to ensure a plan ahead for when we have to go and physically put all of these parts together so we met with Robert Z. our SME to ask for his advice! He gave us an intro into learning AutoCAD where our amazing tech designer Nightray will be working to model the base of the playfield and some of the parts we currently have on hand. We are excited to have a digital version of all of our parts and anticipate it being a big help for when we need to actually start putting things together.

Aside from the CAD intro Robert also talked us though some complex electrical diagraming which I’m not sure any of us understood completely aside from our brilliant Adeline who has been in charge of laying the electrical ground work (no pun intended). Above is a diagram Adeline put together after the meeting showing an overview of our build plans.

Virtual Pinball

On the software side we have started testing our tentative board designs. using a virtual pinball simulator recommended to us by our project advisor Jonathan. We are hoping that this will allow us to test our design and get some real feedback before we have our physical build.

Looking Ahead

Next week we hope to start testing the connections between our hardware and software, and if all goes well we should have a CAD file with all of our parts!