Another lingering problem I've been having is with the slingshots and pop bumper. Originally I was going to control them through the driver boards like everything else, but I realized I'd be able to use 2 boards instead of 3 if I powered them separately. So I figured I'd just drive them with Gottlieb pop bumper driver boards. I had some spares, and they're purpose built for this purpose. But for some reason I can't seem to get them to work well. Unless I gap the switches incredibly wide, the boards will rapid fire. So after a lot of fighting with that I decided that I could make a better pop bumper driver board!
Instead of relying on a 555 timer and some capacitors to handle timing and debounce, I'd use a cheap CPU (a PIC16F1827 8 bit CPU) and code it to work exactly how I needed. Plus, then I could use a single board to drive all three of my coils (these gottlieb boards are so spread out and wasteful!). Since I already had the wiring harness set up to use them, I designed the board so it could work with multiple original 6 pin connectors, or with just two custom connectors (one for inputs, one for coils). And since the CPU had 15 IO pins, I made it drive up to 7 coils (why not?). Still the same size as the original, and mounts using the same standoffs:
I built one up, populated the components for three coils, and hooked it into the machine. It took some tweaking, but the results are quite good. I'm now able to gap the switches incredibly close, so the kickers are super sensitive, and I can adjust the pulse time to get the strength where I want it. The pop bumper is now much stronger, and the slings got set a bit weaker since they've always been concerningly strong when they did get triggered
Curious to see how it performs compared to an actual gottlieb, so at some point I'll build another of these and stick it in my Alien Star, assuming I can get all the connectors to reach
blog comments powered by Disqus