Night Rider
Bally, 1977I'm doing a re-theme ( https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/bally-night-rider-ss-re-theme ) and am starting to work on sounds, voices, for use during game play.
I started with an Uno and MP3 trigger, but decided to go with an Uno and WAV Trigger.
Wondering if other would like to share their experiences with Arduino and perhaps a wav or mp3 trigger.
Robert
Love your progress on whack a mole.
Just curious are you planning on reusing the original MPu and boards from machine or are you going proc and mpf route.
Secondly I notice you added the chimes into the machine. This may distract from your point sounds and mp3/wav sounds.
My assumptions with the retheme is you will want the proc and mpf solution.
This will completely take care of your sound effect direction.
If that is not the case I can make a few suggestions. In my case I did the Arduino mega and the raspberry pi route.
For me the Arduino was the brains and trigger sensing events. It transferred all game event triggers to pi and it played them back. The pi was also the back glass driver but everything was messaged to it real time by Arduino.
Let me know what your thoughts are. You can check out my Arduino conversion of Close Encounters thread to see what I did.
The chimes were rebuilt prior to deciding to attempt adding sounds to the game...so yes they are obsolete now.
My plan now is to use a WAV Trigger as the sounds & voices player and the Uno as the controller, similarly as you did with the Arduino. The WAV trigger has 16 inputs for activation sounds. It instigates them by grounding each of the 16 pins. Each of the 16 triggers can have 1 distinct or several random sounds/voices from each trigger grounding.
I suppose I could use the WAV Trigger without the Uno, by just using switches (double up on switches on some playfield) to activate the WAV Trigger, but that would mean limited added sounds or random sounds.
I thought of using the chime solenoids to activate switches to trigger sounds, since the game continually plays the chimes when the pinball hits things. But there are only 4 chimes, so there would be a lot of random sounds.
I was thinking that I could tap into the playfield and BBox lamps to trigger sounds, using an UNO. What do you think of that idea?
Robert
What are you going to use for the brain for your machine?
Double wiring switches is a lot of extra plumbing.
Quoted from legtod2:What are you going to use for the brain for your machine
What do you recommend?
Robert
Robert,
If your not afraid of coding and hacking then the Arduino Mega and Raspberrry pi or mini windows pc.
If you want a slick mature home brew pinball solution ...
Use the Mission Pinball framework with one of the compatable hardware solutions
(proc, OPP, FAST, etc)
In my humble opinion, the MPF with PROC has a maturity level and online support plus forum support available.
The good news is the MPF frame work code will work with all of them.
The home brew section has a few threads on builders who documented their journey using MPF and Proc.
I am not biased to any of the hardware solutions so I’m sure you would do fine with any of the MPF supported platforms.
Starting to think about sound additions to the game...some possible game sounds, with a few pics of the progress so far.
I'm still thinking Arduino Uno with a MUX Shield activating a WAV Trigger.
Robert
I have a switch matrix controller for Arduino that got me thinking. I wonder if it would be possible to do a circuit that would allow duplicate reading of the mpus switch matrix. I.e. a second switch matrix with pass through.
This would allow the tandem matrix to be plug into the original headers and would allow switch based actions to be performed without any piggyback switches.
The trick would be doing it without adding any latency to the original signal.
Thoughts? Already been done?
Quoted from Cheddar:I wonder if it would be possible to do a circuit that would allow duplicate reading of the mpus switch matrix. I.e. a second switch matrix with pass through.
Not sure what you actually mean.
What I was thinking was to put a pass-through connector between the the backbox lamp connector (J2) and the lamp driver board so I could tap off the 5v being sent to the BB lamps...match, player up, tilt, # of players, etc. As i could use these inputs to trigger voices/sounds. I haven't found a connector yet that could serve this task, that fits on those old Bally connectors. Any help would be appreciated.
I haven't decided how I'm going to get inputs from the coils or switches yet. Of course the "easy" way would be to double up on switches and use a ground signal to activate a sound. But I'd prefer a more elegant solution.
Any thoughts on this effort?
Robert
Cheddar,
One cool switch matrix I saw was to use the Spikenzie B64 solution. The was used by another fellow who did the Arduino conversion for black hole. The switch matrix was 8 x 8 that handled the debounce via hardware. He has a YouTube video of it.
Google spikenzielab B64 to see more details.
It’s the cats meow for using less pins on your Arduino and simplify coding for switch matrix.
It could also be your lamp driver matrix.
Check it out.
Robert,
If you want to build a component system using arduino’s you Could have an arduino that is for lack of a better word your sound board.
This uno would have your wave trigger shield attached to it. It could use serial communications to issue trigger commands like play wave file1 - wave file99. This would remove the need for extra wiring from your play field. You could easily component test it and later drive it using 2 or 4 pins on the board.
I used the same technique on my machine.
Imagine this... one uno may be used to drive your led score, credits, ball display, the second for your sound board, the third your master or brain.
For me I skipped this and went direct to using the mega rather then multiple uno’s cuz it has more usable gpio’s.
Any way that’s food for though. Using many uno’s allow you to learn the coding side and simplify the design into smaller bite size peices.
Quoted from Cheddar:I have a switch matrix controller for Arduino that got me thinking. I wonder if it would be possible to do a circuit that would allow duplicate reading of the mpus switch matrix. I.e. a second switch matrix with pass through.
This would allow the tandem matrix to be plug into the original headers and would allow switch based actions to be performed without any piggyback switches.
The trick would be doing it without adding any latency to the original signal.
Thoughts? Already been done?
I'd also be very interested in this.
I think the only reasonable thing is just replacing all of the switches with these:
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/zf-electronics/E20-50H/CH506-ND/274332
And then creating a redundant switch matrix, or only swapping a few without it.
Depending on the game you could have the flipper power trigger a relay to trigger another relay controlled by a insert light, that way attract mode wouldn't trigger whatever your trying to control.
can you just hook up the strobe/read lines of the existing switch matrix to your arduino then read the strobe / read lines and calculate which switch has been pressed? make sure no internal pull up/pull down resistors are set so it does not put any load on the original switch matrix / give it false readings.
Quoted from rightarmfal:I think the only reasonable thing is just replacing all of the switches with these.
Interesting...
Robert
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