Success!
First things first. I guess it’s not a horrible thing if I disclose what my ‘secret’ project is…. It’s a pinball machine! Cool, isn’t it!? 
Why? Because I want to.
A List..because everybody loves a list:
I’m going to create a fully functional pinball machine from scratch — everything, I won’t be salvaging from another machine. (with the exception of some stand up and drop targets)
Utilize the propeller chip and possibly one or more of the AVR chips
Integrate it all with a computer. This is a ‘pedestrian’ solution. But with this being my first pinball machine I’m going to take the ‘easy’ route.
The head of the machine will have over 8000 leds as well as a atleast 7″ LCD screen.
I have a rough idea of the design I want for the whole machine
I will be using Future Pinball to design/test the playfield.
I have 3 special mini-games planned as of now. I’m sure I’ll come up with more
And finally, I’m going to try out some new things that will go against some of the ‘norms’ of the machines of today and the past.
End of my list. Great wasn’t it? Back to our regularly scheduled program….
As of now I’m in the process of doing a LOT of research and making a lot of concept setups. A couple of examples are the of picture in the previous post and the video below:
Explanation:
The picture in the previous post is a test scenario of detecting what switch was pressed as well as detect if multiple switches are pressed at the same time. The main concept I wanted to test was bitmasking.
When a button is pressed it will send a binary ‘package’ (via serial) to my C# program.
For example with 5 buttons the ‘package’ would be 00000 when nothing is pressed. If you were to push/hit button #1 it would send the packet 00001. Button 1 and 3 would send 00101. Bitmasking is a big plus in programming as I don’t have to have a lot of different if statements all over the code.
The video is an test of charlieplexing. The impressive part about that 4x5 matrix is that it’s run off of 5 pins on the propeller chip. Why is this important? The propeller chip has 32 general purpose I/O pins that I can use. This allows you to control 992 (N(N-1) ie 32*31 = 992) LEDs off of those 32 pins! (Note: I’m still not too sure about the power requirements/problems with running 992 LEDs off of one prop chip. My other option is GuGaplexing (2*N*(N-1)). However, this method is far more complex and adds more components to the mix).
So that’s a general overview of what I’ve accomplished in the last couple of days. I have a ton more information to add here but the majority of it is on paper (yes, paper still exists ). I also have a ‘theme’ for the pinball machine but I will let that rollout as the machine progresses.
I appologize if this post made no sense. I didn’t really put my full attention into this one.
