Arduino Pinball Restoration
I found a pinball machine sitting disassembled on the floor of a leaky shed and brought it home to tinker with. The mechanisms and electronics inside were all rusted solid, as was most of the metal on the outside. The backglass had lost half its paint, and one entire side of the machine was covered in mold.
I'd originally planned to disassemble the machine for parts, but after I got the glass off I found that the playfield itself was in amazing condition. With the glass to protect it and no light, it had survived unscathed, and I couldn't bring myself to tear it up. Instead, I decided to teach myself some electrical engineering and wire it all up to an Arduino.
I managed to clean off the mold and dirt using a combination of extremely toxic solutions. The door and plunger needed to be sand-blasted and repainted. Luckily, the rails along the edges were stainless steel, so they only needed a quick cleaning.
If you've got any questions, feel free to email or tweet me; I'll be happy to elaborate
Requisite Reading - 5/10/2013
- "On the importance of Magical Girl Heroines & Weaponized Femininity"
- "You, Too, Can Be a Monster"
- "Techno-Culturally Faking It"
- "PS Vita Is Dead; Long Live PS Vita"
- "The hidden dangers of legal highs"
- "Notes on Tomb Raider"
- "Spirits by the Numbers"
Sales data for Spirits
- "Let's Play: the first section of Anomalous Materials from Half-Life 1"
Requisite Reading - 5/3/2013
- "Soylent Month Three"
I'm amazed how much they can figure out about nutrition
- "Cities & The Dead"
Interesting interpretation of capitalism
- "Our Immiscible Future"
on formalism vs zinesters
- "Getting the development / PR balance right">
- "Love or Money?"
- "Fiction Denial"
- "Steven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Talk"
Fascinating both for the parallels to game development and for more general insights
- "Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Might Be The Highest Form of Literature on the Planet"
An exaggeration, of course, but Pratchett is the only time I've seen comedy not get in the way
- "Zooming In"
More pretty paperrendering
Requisite Reading - 4/13/2013
- "Bioshack"
- "Only one of Infinite Endings"
- "He Doesn’t Row: Player Interaction in Bioshock Infinite"
- "Why Is "Bioshock Infinite" A First-Person Shooter"
- "Richard Cobbett on Bioshock 2"
- "BioShock Infinite: Now Is The Best Time"
- "Broken World: the Failure of Columbia"
- "There's Subtlety, Then There's Cowardice"
- "BioShock Infinite’s first moments, and why game openings are so important"
- "Nobody at the tower"
- "The American Dream(s)"
- "On Bioshock Infinite"
- "Cara Loft : Tomb Raider Concept Raiding"
a bit of info on the development process
- "From Doom to Dishonored, considering the firstperson shooter's various waveforms"
I miss 100pt based health...
- "No One Knows About Your Game"
A sobering reminder
- "Bloggingheads With 'The Week's Scott Meslow : 'Game of Thrones' As TV Novel, And 'Mad Men' Season Six"
I've always wondered about the mechanics of multiple protagonists in video games
- "A Letter to Leigh"
There was a big fuss about this letter, but reading responses to it felt like we must have read a different letter. As it is, it contains a few interesting observations throughout its rambling length
- "The Jellyfish Entrepreneur"
- "If you make PCs and you’re not Lenovo, you might be in trouble"
It's not the market, it's you
- "Talking is Harmful"
SPEC OPS SPEC OPS SPEC OPS
- "Android piracy still sucks"
A pirated copy is still a lost sale, it just isn't costing you money
- "Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle"
It's only a matter of time until you don't need to aim
- "Plastic Soul: One man's quest to build an AI that can create games"
- "We Are One: JRPGs, the Group Journey, and the Mechanics of Cooperation"
- "Identifying the “Problem” with Female Protagonists"
- "Light and shadow"
More interesting information on rendering paper
- "Mansplainer, For Men: Why Don’t Women Like It When You Tell Them They’re Hot, In Public?"
- "Mobile Hardware Stats (and More)"
Mobile is growing
- "This Isn’t the Article I Wanted to Write About Tomb Raider"
On triggers
- "Brindle on Mechanics"
