Verifying Fortytwo's statement. I just checked my machine and there's no taper. The larger of the two rods seems to be 3/8" in diameter.

The pulley wheel diameter is about 1.75". The thickness is 1cm, with an inner groove of 8mm. The center of the top pulley wheel is separated from the center of the bottom pulley wheel by 28".

The guide rail is 0.25" in diameter, and it seems to be 28" in height.

I agree. If the weight, reliability, or quality of the bearings become an issue, I recommend we go with the hole in the block method. I think the piece that connects the pulley to the telecoping rod should be 3D printed, whether in full or with screw points for these cheap bearings winteriscoming has found.

IMG_6136_zps2427d580_(resized).jpg

I did a little searching around for a good light solution a few days ago, and what I've been thinking is using FadeCandy from Adafruit to control the lights:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1689

Plugs in by USB, and it takes the 3 pin WS2812 lights from your Amazon link and any others made to that specification, including those string lights I linked earlier, and the RGB ring someone else linked. You don't need to worry about potential timing problems, because this thing can operate 8 separate strips of 64 RGB LEDs, so 512 RGB pixels. You can add more FadeCandy PCBs for even more lights, but I think 512 would already light up my entire house, haha.

BYOAC has new accounts' permissions locked down hard. I didn't have permission to private message other users, or even view their profiles. Wouldn't matter though, because he said in his response to me:

Once complete everything will go open source, the reason we aren't do releases as we go is because things are still in flux and I personally don't want to put out bad poop, have someone spend money, get ahead of me only to find out it doesn't work as advertised. Plans, parts lists, music, code, the works.

So we're not going to get that specific information from him until the new machine is done.

You could detect every hole on the game using no switches. instead make a grid of beams like a IR touchscreen and then you know what hole has been entered by what pair of row/column sensors has been broken first.

Next I would not recommend using lead screws for the bar. this will give no play in the bar unless you design something into it to compensate. The original system used the rubber bands because they would give and slip on the pulley if they needed to prevent the telescopic rod from getting bent or dented by a ball wedging between a hole and the bar.

And I would not use analog sticks as the digital ones are what made the game hard.

Just my $0.03

Also didn't read page 2 or 3 so if I repeated some things sorry.

A grid of detectors and emitters has been suggested a few times, but I don't think it's viable. The problem is that your emitters need to have laser-like accuracy because their beams need to travel a relatively long distance, at least 20" in each dimension, and they will probably have to be spaced out 1" or less from each other because of how clustered some of the holes are.

That's a good point that I don't know that we considered yet (I didn't), but we've already decided to go back to the pulley method.

Already decided on digital joysticks.

Yeah, you're going to miss some stuff that way and maybe give outdated advice.

I'm in the same boat. I haven't had a chance to read two pages of posts to catch up. I will though. Love the idea. I would also state the cabinet construction of the original ICB was crap material. A flat pack would be better than the original. I think the general beer references work well (sound pack). And one could get custom wraps made for playfeild or cab to suit favorite brand.

Once a plan is made many people can get into sourcing the parts decals sound packages. Would be a fun group project. I did just build a house and remember 500 her and 500 the add up. So let's not go Cadillac on every part if not needed.
My .03. (Like the inflation)
FortyTwo

The game was fun and hard enough with just the 10 holes. I'm still n for two or three per level that randomly changes each time.
So a max of 30 lights and switch.
In respect to optos for the boards. Someone should ask Hans at Starcraft. He was saying to get pre made custom boards was pretty cheap. The smaller the better. Like a horseshoe.
Fortytwo

This is true. I think the original cabinet is built out of particle board.

A little late to the party, but I had an idea about the holes for the vertical playfield. To make them more visually interesting, you could drill the holes a bit larger then stick a plastic tube in the hole (that would accomidate the ball), sand the end of the tube to make it frosted, then light it with LEDs.

Do that with multiple holes, and you could indicate variable targets and also put on some light shows.

Yeah, that's in the plans.

I've only had a cursory look at FadeCandy, so I can't speak with any sort of authority on its merits over anything else. I don't know that it's necessarily the best option available, but I do think we need some sort of interface board like this with a supporting Python library for light management vs. wiring LEDs directly into the RPi. Maybe not necessary for vanilla ICB builds with only 10 holes to light in a single color, but games like ours that would light every hole in RGB are probably going to need it, especially for complex light shows. ICB has 83 holes; FadeCandy could easily support an RGB LED on all of them.

FadeCandy simplifies the process of interacting with a large number of RGB LEDs. It also has some integrated processing features that automatically enhance the colors (temporal dithering for color correction and depth) and it has a lot of code examples for how to operate it. FadeCandy is also compatible with the Mission Pinball Framework, in case we decide we are going to program our game using that system (if it can support that).

I haven't started thinking about displays much yet. I was almost thinking maybe we should start the vanilla code with a segmented LED display, but realized that would probably be more expensive than using one of these touch screens and just emulating the look of segmented LEDs. I wouldn't worry if the screen has touch interface built-in, we simply won't connect it and pretend the functionality is not there. I was thinking for my game that I would use an automobile rearview mirror with an ultra widescreen LCD built-in, which would be closer to the ratio of a pinball DMD.

I'm in for one!

I just had a brain storm concerning the lit holes and using plexi tubes to conduct light.
One could make the tubes longer, maybe a half inch. Then drill two holes in the tail across from each other. We could then glue in or push in the LED shape ir opto set. The style sega used in their trough. Either a tight fit or a dab of glue will hold it.
A jig could be made for a mill or drill press to bore the holes correctly.
Even a third hole on top for the LED.

Then we glue them into the board, sand the who,e thing, apply vynal overlay that could slightly cover the gap lines like key lines.

I'm in the process of mapping out the coordinates of the holes on my cabinet, but they are all one of three sizes: target holes have diameters of 3/4", the rest of the holes have diameters of either 1" or 1 1/8". These measurements would be the inner diameters of the tubes we buy so that we don't change the gameplay.

I'd recommend connecting by HDMI. It will be a little more expensive for the monitor, but I think to connect composite on RPi requires a separate dongle, so that narrows the price difference a little bit. Aside from that HDMI is going to allow using the maximum clarity and full resolution of the LCD panel.

I think the IR detectors' output is analog. I don't think we'd be able to connect them to an I-PAC.

This IR detector is digital, unlike the Sparkfun model. https://www.adafruit.com/products/2167

why a RPi? this game is simple enough that an arduino should be able to do it unless you want to do fancy animations or something on a big display?

Yeah, fancy animations and stuff is why. I already own an Ice Cold Beer, so just a replication of the existing game is of little interest to me. I want light shows and sound effects and video screens, and Arduino won't cut it for all that. RPi might be overkill for just an ICB replica, but the base code being written for that rather than Arduino means that winteriscoming and I won't have to rewrite everything again for RPi when we go to build our custom features. Might as well start with what we already know we're going to use.

if you are going to go with an rpi because you want fancy video you should definitely go HDMI, 1080p vs 480i should be a no brainer

P^3 uses an approach like this, and has very good accuracy, I believe.

BTW, creating custom circuit boards is not as hard or has expensive as you may think.

And the pcb if your going through the trouble should also hold the light.

I know the clear tube is a cool idea but what about a foil or reflective paint on the hole and a bright led shooting down from the top.
Would make assembly and cost easier. Of course blinking would help to see it.

Second displays are cheap for RPI plus there are a lot of resources for them. I'm game for that as controller. Where will the display go? In the playfeild like the original? I say in the flat pack leave a small hole and let the user source and cut to fit what they can get avalible.

It would be behind the glass so a touch would be pointless. Unless its users for service mode and tests.

I used pcbway.com for the manufacturing. A few of the home-brew guys have used them. They turned it around in a couple of days. Shipping was about half the total cost. The price per board drops significantly the more you make. I don't think there is much, if any, price difference between 1 and 2 layer boards.

There are lots of software choices, especially if you are using windows, I use a Mac, and ended up using osmondpcb which is free. Did not take long to figure out the software and the only issue I ran into was having a missing 'mechanical' layer, the first time I sent the files to pcbway.com. I did have a more knowledgeable friend look it over and advise me on best practices for routing the traces.

The whole process was easier than I expected. Fortunately I got the design right on the first try. A few things I would tweak, but nothing that made the boards not usable. I'll be posting more info on the RGB LED boards I created in my casino home-brew thread (https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/casino/) sometime in the next week, when I start to mount them on the playfield.

You can get the addressable RGB LEDs in through hole style

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12986

RGB SMD LEDs on a breakout board:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13282

FAST has these: https://squareup.com/market/fast-pinball-llc/item/fast-rgb-led-insert

Just got caught up on the topic. Nice progress. I'm perfectly fine with the Raspberry Pi. This might be a bit dumb, but what about adding the camera module to take a picture with your high score. I also appologize because my technical skills on some of this stuff are a bit lacking. I might need to ask a lot of questions as we are proceeding. I hope that's okay.

Yeah, looking at the Raspberry Pi 3 is what gave me the idea for the camera. It's a $15 part.

For the I-PAC, will transistors be necessary? Forgive my electronics naivety, but I figured you could plug the IR sensor's data pin into one of the I-PAC's inputs and then connect the sensor's power pin to an external 5V power source, then share the ground with the I-PAC, and it would just work without any other components (maybe a resistor).

Edit: Based on this example, it looks like my thought process wouldn't work. Bummer. https://learn.adafruit.com/ir-breakbeam-sensors

Second edit: Haha, okay I understand now. The IR sensor IS a transistor itself. I suppose for I-PAC, we would need it to operate the opposite of a microswitch. When IR is detected, the circuit should be open. When the IR is not detected, the the circuit should be closed.

I can't make an assumption on the I-PAC, but there is a shared ground for all the pushbuttons. I assume the answer could be found with a multimeter? One probe on ground, the other on an input pin. If there is current, then it is normally LOW and when the button is pressed it becomes HIGH; if there is no current, then it is normally HIGH and when the button is pressed it becomes LOW. Is this correct? I have an I-PAC, and I believe I have a multimeter somewhere that I can dig up.