This is a great thread. Let me toss in my 2cents from a designer and mfg of electronics.

There is a lot of technology available that I think could be used to lower the cost of NIB pinball machines, and make pinball more appealing to the operators.

1. Get rid of the wiring harness and go with a serial bus. Use a car as an example. They link all of their subsystems through a very robust CAN bus network. A single CAN node can control as few as 1 or as many as 8 lights, motors, solenoids. You would need at least a 4 conductor cable run through the game to the various nodes (2 signal, +5 and GND) and maybe a 5th if you were doing solenoids (assuming feature lamps are LED). Stern claims they have run as much as a 1/4 mile of wire in a game.
2. CAN can run up to 4MBits /sec. More than enough capability there, and you can have as many as 127 nodes.
3. From a marketing perspective, let's say you have an internet/wifi connection to the game. A smart individual could come up with a marketing plan that would sell add space to display on the screen. The operator of a sports bar could sell advertising space to the local beer distributors that would only show up during attract mode. A wifi connection would allow the "distributor" to see how many times his adds ran and pay the operator a set amount per add. Same sports bar, maybe it is a local college sports paraphenalia store that wants to drum up some more business for things like hats, shirts, sports stuff. A wifi connection is required to make stuff like this happen.

There are lots of ideas out there to bring Pinball into 21st technology, but it also requires money and those innovative people out there to make it happen.

Brett

Gerry,

Excellent point. I was thinking CAN primarily because of a car analogy. RS-485 with a custom protocol is just as straight forward. I have been following your work and I am very impressed with your accomplishments. I think the key to making a new pinball architecture successful is the decentralization of drivers. Smaller, localized solenoid driver boards and lamp drivers addressable by the CPU is key. The mindset has always been the more wires and fewer PCBs the simpler it is. That just is not the case. If just one solenoid drive transistor goes up in smoke, you have to take out that driver board and repair the damage and pray it didn't take out the pre-driver and logic on the way down. Localized drivers under the playfield would probably not impact the other drivers and be a lot easier to repair/replace. Just think, if there was a wifi connection it could contact the operator and say it needs a service call and what actually failed.

XPin