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==PART I - The Gottlieb Surf Champ Arduino Clock==

I've been sporadically working on this project for a while, and if you haven't been following the progress it's all documented below.
Here's the end result.
Long story short, a clock running on an Arduino to drive Gottlieb score reels.

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And here are some pics with mommy. You can see the hours stays the same on each pic... The return spring on the minutes clock broke off. At first I thought it was an electronic issue and was pretty disappointed but was glad to see it was just this small mechanical issue which I was able to easily repair.

I had also thought of masking the back of the translite to only let light through the surfer gal and the machine title, but I like that the whole backglass kinda lights up so I'll be leaving it this way.

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The youtube video in action:

And here's the long story...

I wanted to learn to mess around with Arduinos and try something pinball related. I’ve heard that building pinball machines is hard, so I figured I’d just start with a clock.
I’m doing this while my other pinball projects are held up by the lack of a garage and the cold Canadian winter not going away, so I’m not going for perfection here, so please bear with me.
Sorry for the crappy picture quality too, I have a bad cell phone...

First thing, I got a set of old rusty Gottlieb score reels. I pulled them apart and dumped them in my cheap ass ultrasonic cleaner with just regular dishwashing liquid, and that got them clean enough for my liking.

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Next up I wanted to try wet sanding from 400 to 2000 grit on metal as I’ve seen in that great Space Shuttle restore thread just to see what that could do, and I’ve got to say it works wonders.
Again I’m cutting corners here, because I got Evaporust, which I should have used before sanding, after the fact, and didn’t bother to try getting a mirror finish.
On the top plates which were really rusted, I got a pretty good result but not mirror perfect because I didn’t spend enough time cleaning the previous grit’s marks before moving to the next.
For the side plates, which weren’t that bad to begin with, I did get pretty close to a perfect mirror finish though.

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Next up, I soldered diodes to the coils to protect the electronics I would use to drive them. These are not necessary on an EM as there are no electronics to fry, but for an SS machine you want that diode to short whatever back current you might get instead of letting it get to components upstream.

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...
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For the CPU I got an Arduino mini. This runs on 5V DC.

Mini05_front.jpg

EM score reels usually run at 28V AC, but after looking through forums the consensus seemed to be that converting them to DC gave them more kick, so I figured I could get away with 24V DC.
I wanted to use a single power supply to get both my Arduino and coil voltage which is why I wanted DC. I found one I liked that gave 5V and 24V which is why I settled with the 24V.

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Now EMs work with relays. One coil pulls down, closing a switch which allows current to flow and activate another coil. This is basically what I want to do but using solid state electronics.
I want my Arduino to output a 5V which will close connections allowing the 24V to drive my coils. This is what transistors are for.

185px-NPN_common_emitter.svg.png

In this case, Vin is my 5V, Rc is my coil and V+ is my 24V.

One other thing I checked before getting my power supply was that it could handle the workload of firing the coils. Since my clock only does minutes, I figured I could get away with firing only one coil at once.
I measured the coils at 8 Ohm resistance. Given V=RI,
I = V/R
I = 24/8 = 3Amps

My power supply can handle 8 Amps so that works.

I then tried to wing it and use any old transistor I had laying around to try my first test.
Well the darn thing exploded and emitted some black smoke. Turns out it was WAY too small to handle the workload.
After some calculations (which are explained a couple of posts down), I ended up ordering a bunch of our old friend, the TIP 121 which can be found in most SS machines to drive the coils.

tip121.jpg

When starting with this kind of stuff you really want to do one step at a time, secure it, test it, then move on.
So next up was getting the Arduino set up and running a sample program.

I went with the Arduino mini because I figured a clock was a simple a project as you could do so I could use their simplest board. It has 16 I/O pins, which I'll be using like this:

-4 outputs to drive each of the score reels.
-1 to 3 inputs to figure out the position of each reel
-2 inputs to adjust the time (one for the minutes, one for the hours)

I wanted to keep things simple, so I'm not multiplexing or serializing anything. Each input corresponds to one coil or switch.

You need a USB to serial board to hook up your Arduino to your computer.
There is an Arduino IDE which allows you to program in C++ and upload your compiled code to the board.
Getting set up is not that hard, although with this kind of stuff there's always more fudging around than you'd like when you get started.

The "Hello World" program for the Arduino is just hooking up an LED to a pin and making it blink on and off on 5V.

Arduino_1.0_IDE,_Ubuntu_11.10.png

Once I got this working I figured I could just take that 5V and drive it into my transistor to fire my score reel.

Now you can't just hook up your transistor directly to your board without a resistance in between. The resistance goes between Vin and B on the diagram above.
The following excerpt from http://electronicsclub.info/transistorcircuits.htm explains the calculation of that resistance.
Calculating Ic(max) and hFE(min) earlier would also have helped me avoid the tiny transistor explosion I mentioned earlier. The TIP121's spec can handle those max and min values.

Capture.PNG

After some messing around and frying some more stuff, I managed to get a single coil to fire. Success!

Now that I managed to get my ouput going, I figured I'd move on to getting input back from the reel to give its position. Gottlieb score reels have two separate mechanisms to actuate position. One of those is a stack of switches that lets the next reel know that this reel is about to roll over, being at the 9 position.

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I figured I'd feed a 5V to one of this switch's lugs, catch that 5V as an input in my Arduino and call it a day. Wrong again!
It turns out you can't just have a long loose wire with a small gap to a source of current and hook that straight as an input pin in your board, because that pin won't read 0.
The wire will get a bunch of induced noise from surrounding electrical currents and your pin will always read high or not be reliable.
This is why you need to "pull down" that pin.

Pulling down your pin means you're going to ground it so it remains at 0 when it's supposed to. However you don't want to hook it directly to the ground or else your "good" 5V will end up there too.
So there's another resistor that needs to go here.

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The Arduino website tells us

"Often it is useful to steer an input pin to a known state if no input is present. This can be done by adding a pullup resistor (to +5V), or a pulldown resistor (resistor to ground) on the input. A 10K resistor is a good value for a pullup or pulldown resistor."

I guess I am... I don't think anybody has much use for a huge clock that makes noise every minute, the whole point was to learn a thing or two
I'll go check it out when I'm done and see how much both projects differ!

==The code==

Now I can't actuate each reel at each position since I have 12 inputs left, with 2 I'll use to adjust the time.
I didn't want to multiplex or serialize so that leaves me 10 inputs to figure out the position of the reels well enough to give the correct time.
I had an approximative idea of how I was gonna do this, but I figured I'd write all the code first before I'd start soldering stuff to make sure I didn't forget anything.

I decided to go object oriented C++ for the code because that’s what I’m used to doing, and I’d try to adapt my way of working as I’d run into trouble with the Arduino language. That didn’t happen, I coded it in straight C++ and pretty much everything worked right off the bat.

It’s a really simple project, again, so it’s probably overkill to do this with objects, and I don’t foresee any expansion to this thing. The whole thing sounds better in concept than it’s actually coded as I just cranked it out to get it done with and as I was doing it I realized the 4 reel's behaviors were not all that similar and my design wasn't all that clean.

The main concept is that each reel has:

• A state in which the reel is about to roll over
  • For 1 minutes reel that means being at position 9
  • For 10 minutes reel that means being at positions 5 to 9 (just in case it somehow winds up at a 7, which it has no reason of being at)
  • For 1 hours reel that means being at 9 if the 10 hours reel is at 0, and being at 2 if the 10 hours reel is at 1
• A state in which it just rolled over
  • This is just a flag set by the RollOver function
• A state where it’s at 0
• A different way of rolling over
  • For 1 minutes reel that means stepping once
  • For the 10 minutes reel that means stepping until we hit the 0
• Etc.

Thank you. More updates coming, as the project is further along than the updates are, but I still have ways to go and I'll update the whole process.
I hope to be done within a month - I don't get to work too often and too long on this.

The way I've done it right now wouldn't allow it, but that's only because I elected for the CPU not to know the exact position of each reel. It only knows when it's supposed to roll the reel over, step up the next reel or reset the whole thing (at 12:59).

So you'd need 10 wires coming out of each reel into a shift register, and the code would need to be updated to be able to set the clock back to a specific time. You'd need to figure out when the machine is turned on or off which would be pretty easy.
You could get your power before the on-off
switch so that it could run while the machine is turned off but plugged in.
What the shift register does is it allows you to store the values of multiple switches at one time, then retrieve them one at a time through the same pin (serializing). You get one at each clock tick, so it's pretty much instantaneous.

If you know EMs you probably already know this, but these plates allow knowing at exactly which digit the reel is.
A metal part bridges the gap between the common at the middle and each of the digits.

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(Got that pic on Google)

So for the needs of my project I have as input on the score position:

Just the 9 on 1 minutes reel:
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5 to 9 and 0 on the 10 minutes reel:
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0, 2 to 8 and 9 on the 1 hours reel (last digit is 9 if 10 hours is at 1, 2 if 10s is at 1):
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0 on the 10 hours reel (if it's not 0 we treat it as 1):
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Here's a video that shows a switch (I'll use a flipper button for this) that closes the gap to send 5V to an input on the Arduino.
To the left of the Arduino, you see a row of resistors. These are the pull down resistors I explained before.
To the right you see the resistors between the Arduinos and the transistors. To the right is the 24V line which drives the reels.

So when I push that switch, the Arduino sees that the corresponding input reads high.
It calls the IncrementMinutes() function in my code, which sends a high signal (+5V) to the transistor for the 1 minutes reel, which lets the 24V through for 200ms, just enough for the reel to step.

And now here's putting it all together.
You can see what happens at 12:59, while you're sound asleep which, again, is why it's not very practical as an actual clock. You can really see how I'm only firing one coil at a time. Maybe not so efficient but I have a minute to do what I have to do so no hurry (again, cutting corners here - if this were a production thing I'd step up the power supply and update the code to have everything happening at once).

In the video all is being controlled with the adjustment switches. I let it run on the actual clock for 2 days, and it was still perfect to the 10th of a second as far as I could tell.

This uses the Arduino internal clock, which rolls over every 50 days. This means that every 50 days you'll be up to a minute off.

Now that the code is complete, my next steps are building a "cabinet" and transferring my circuit from this test breadboard to a permanent one.
This is where I'm actually at on the project now, so slower updates from now on.

I don't, but I could.
Would you then want me to send you the code and you'd upload it yourself? Or you could have an Arduino sent to my place and I can load the code for you if you like.

Started cutting the pieces of the cabinet.
The white melamine piece gives you an idea of the size of the backglass.
I went pretty much as small as I could to fit the reels and the power supply on top of one another.

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Putting the cabinet together.

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I planned ahead a little bit, but now I have to figure out how to fit everything in.
I don't foresee that you'd need to remove the backglass, but I'll still see if I can do it so that you can slide everything out to access the front end.

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Some more work on the cab.
I'm glueing a strip of wood that will hold the backglass in place and put some wood putty to make everything smooth and sharp.
That wood putty's great for a sloppy woodworker with dull blades like I am.

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Cut plexiglass sheets for the backglass. I cracked one while doing it, but I was thinking of putting a translite in between two sheets to keep it nice and flat, so the cracked one can probably go behind.

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Flipper buttons to adjust time. Opted to go for Williams style since Gottlieb EM style are designed to go with side rails. I might order some different color options to match the theme. I might also still get some Gottlieb EM style ones to try em out.

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Yeah I had thought about that, but the problem is how do you set the alarm. I'm sure there would be some way to do that with the single score reel set, but again, wanted to keep it simple.
The Arduino starter kit has a remote control, so you could set it with a remote I guess.

Progress has been slow lately, but here's a mock up of the back glass that's a sneak peek for the theme.
Doing a Gottlieb was a no brainer because of the Gottlieb reels and I don't care much for other EM makers. Then I'm a big Gordon Morison fan. Last I had some leftover paint from a previous Surf Champ cabinet.

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Alright,
lots of progress, and I'm starting to see the home stretch, although there's still lots to go.

Added the brackets that hold the melamine board in place. This is what holds everything.

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Did the transplant from the test breadboard to permanent. I had a couple cold solders, but I was really careful not to have any shorts between the 5V and 24V circuits. After a couple of tries got everything working again.

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The whole assembly slides out as a single piece.

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How it looks from the back.

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And here's how it looks from the front.

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Here are the schematics. I drew them before doing the transfer for safety.

schematics.png

Forgot to draw it but I have a fuse on the way out of the 24V +.

*Edit:*
I screwed up the drawing... these are not 100 Ohm but 10K Ohm.
Again, from the Arduino site:
"Often it is useful to steer an input pin to a known state if no input is present. This can be done by adding a pullup resistor (to +5V), or a pulldown resistor (resistor to ground) on the input. A 10K resistor is a good value for a pullup or pulldown resistor.""

Yes, you're right, that would have been a nice touch. On top of that I used mostly hard aluminum wires which isn't that great of an idea. I wanted to cut down on my BOM a little bit and had some of that stuff laying around.

Just put up an order at pinball life, mainly for the lighting and the flipper buttons.
In the meantime, I'll get to work on cabinet paint.

Also, I own a Surf Champ but it's at my dad's place a couple hours away. I'd need a high res scan of the backglass to adapt it for my project. If anyone can help with that I'd be a taker, but if not no big deal, I'll have to go visit my dad at some point and play a couple of games.

Here's what I have for the side art.
I reworked the full thing to get the full story on the smaller surface. My plan is to print the colors separately on paper, then lay two opposite layers of frisket on top of one another, the printed paper on top and try to cut both at the same time. I'll try to make all the lines smoother as I do it.

image-36.jpg

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The sad life of a pinhead with no garage.
Painting the primer in the back of my van because it's raining outside.

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I will next time I bring in another pinball machine in the house.

Slowly progressing.
I did the first two coats of antique white on the cabinet. I'll do another 2 in 2 days and then work on the side art.

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I decided to make a base. The top part is just sitting there, I'll screw it there when the paint is done.

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Got my PinballLife order. The translucent Blue and Yellow flipper buttons look neat, I'll see which ones fit better once the side art is painted. Got some sockets for backglass lighting, and then got these things for score reel lighting.
Just great.

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Oh well at the speed things are going I have the time to order the correct size.

You'll notice I'm holding an LED in there (soft white). Sliding out the whole assembly is not THAT easy, so I don't want to have to do it, and I decided not to have any holes for venting the heat because I want to bottle in the noise as well. LEDs don't get hot so that could help.
My gamble is that the power supply is not gonna get the inside of the machine hot enough that it's gonna be a problem. We'll see how that goes, I can always drill the holes after the fact on top of the machine, but I'd much rather not have to do it, as everything's gonna be already painted.

I could have tested it before I went and painted everything but I don't have a back door made yet...

It's not webbing on the Surf Champ, it's the speckles. I'll do that with the airbrush, you just need to remove the tip of the gun and do short bursts. I'll let my girlfriend handle that part, she did it on the full size Surf Champ and it looked A-OK to me.

Second coat is now drying, I'll try to finish up the painting this weekend.

Progress still much slower than I'd like, but progress nonetheless.

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I explained it earlier in the thread, and if you look at the video you actually see it going from 12:59 to 1:00. But basically each reel has a "will roll over" state and a "roll over" function which act differently depending on the reel and in relation with the other reels' state.

Alright, looking pretty good! I think I'll go with the blue buttons...

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Alright so what's left is:
-lighting: I'll do the translite first to see where I put the lights
-translite: I'm in contact with someone who may be able to provide a scan shortly, then a friend of mine who's an illustrator will fill in the blanks for me
-back door: I had a replacement made for an EM machine by a local shop who make ducts, I'll see if they'll make one for me for this

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Sure, again not my finest work so I don't feel like putting it out there for prying eyes, but I don't mind sending it to you by e-mail.

I contacted Wade Krause after being tipped by another Pinside member that he might have a scan of the backglass and he was kind enough to provide one.
I worked on it a little tonight, and I'm sending it off to my friend who will fill in the gaps for me.

Here's a preview.

mockup.jpg

Hey Jim,
if it were just the code I think it wouldn't be a big deal. The issue is the wiring. If you look at the schematics, I had to engineer it to use what available inputs I have, so I don't know the value of each digit, I just know the significant ones.
For instance, for the first reel that's 0 and 1 only, the second I need to treat the 2 a specific way (last number at 12:59) and the 9 as well (last number at 09:59). I'm pretty sure it could be reworked for a 24:00 clock, but I'd need to test the code to make sure it works with the different wiring and all.
Not sure what deal we could work out, I have 0 interest in going back and messing with that so no reasonable amount of money would do it, sorry.
But I don't mind sharing the existing code with you though if you can live with the 12 hour clock.

Just as long as I don't see a big preorder thread for a score reel clock popping up in a few days

I've been figuring out the lighting these past few days, I just have a couple wires left to solder before I can try it out.
I should be able to do that before the end of the weekend.

I've got 5 sockets in the backboard and one for each digit. 2 per digit would have been better but I don't have enough of the right sockets and I don't feel like waiting anymore. With the right LEDs I think that should do the job.

So I spent some time the last 2 days figuring out the lighting. The panel think I did a pretty clean job with. For the reels I didn't have an EM at home with me to get the right setup, but I figures I'd wing something out with electrical tape.
I plug everything and...
Wow, 2 out of 9 LEDs are on. Great.

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I do some continuity tests, think long and hard about this using my full brain power and suddenly it dawns on me:
THE D IN LED STANDS FOR DIODE YOU GODD#MN RET#RD!

Yep, I didn't worry about which way I wired the sockets since it doesn't matter for light bulbs but this is running on DC current and LEDs are directional.

Oh well my friend hasn't begun working on the translite yet so there's time to redo it...

Here's with regular bulbs:

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Since 7 out of 9 LEDs were out I just switched the wires, and I rewired the 2 LEDs that now became backwards.
I also figured out a way to screw the reel sockets cleanly.

I put everything back in and... the horror! Nothing works anymore, the Arduino light is off and I think I even heard something frying.
It's almost midnight, I have to go to bed... the next morning the weather girl on TV is rambling about how nice a day it's gonna be so I won't be able to spend the day in the basement without looking like a crazy misfit. Dang weather. Rains when I need to paint, sunny when I want to work inside.
I go bike riding with the family, go to the park, mow the lawn, put the baby for her nap, and finally, back to the basement.

I spent a whole lot of time trying to find the short, and I noticed that when I pulled out the reel metal support from the backboard the short was gone. I realized I had a short between the lights and that metal support.
Upon closer inspection, I saw the leg of a staple protruding from the side and touching the support.
I removed the staple and everything seemed ok again.

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I rescrewed everything in place, testing after each step, and now I have a fully LED'd clock.

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For those who didn't follow the whole thing, the reason I want to go with LEDs is that it's not that easy to pull everything out to access the lights so I don't want them burning out, and it's awfully crammed in there so I want to limit the heat, both from the lights and from the power supply, as incandescents draw more current, unless I'm mistaken.

Still on the list:
-assemble the two backbox parts and drill a hole for the power cord to exit from under box
-have the translite drawn and printed
-get a back door made

Back door's done.
Maybe I'll polish it just a tad.

IMG_20150615_135936662.jpg

My buddy's done with the translite, I just need to tweak the holes for the numbers, then get prints on different materials to see what looks best.

Oh and I let it run with the plexiglas in front and no backdoor and my girlfriend got up to shut the door to the basement because it bugged her during the night... I don't think that metal door's gonna do much to deaden the noise so I might have to look into adding more plexiglas sheets in the front and maybe putting some insulation inside the door.

Again, not a very practical project as nobody likes a noisy clock besides crazy pinheads like us who enjoy the soothing sound of score reel coils in the night.

Thank you for the tip. If I were just starting I'd do this, or if I were planning to do more of these things. I'll keep that in mind if I need timing for my future projects.

Did a tad of polishing.

IMG_20150615_195554609.jpg

Alright,
finished tweaking the translite. Next update will be the completed project.
It might be a while, I have a pretty busy schedule the next few days.

Here's the translite art, thanks to my buddy "Bean" Carrier for filling in the gaps for me.

Alright,
I'm calling this one done. Not perfect, some rough edges, but I spent a lot more time than I'd planned and I'm pretty happy with the results.

Go back to the first post for the presentation.

Thank you.
Yes, it doesn't make much sense any way you look at it. Just in materials I must be in over 300$, if I count my time it's probably worth a nice B-lister.
I wanted to put it on my desk at the office but it's way too noisy. I'll see if insulating the back makes a difference, but I'll be surprised if it does. Anyway the whole point was building it, not using it...

Go back to the first post...

Thanks.
I'm going to see my dad this weekend, who has the Surf Champ machine at his place. I'll see if I can do another little photo shoot there with its big sister

It would have to be re-engineered for sure. WAY too noisy. I'm guessing those Whoa Nellie! reels must be much more quiet, not sure if they can be acquired.
All wiring would need to be redone.
Code would need to be redone.
Power supply would need to be changed since I'm guessing they don't run on 24V DC.
New theme would have to be found as I don't own the rights to Gottlieb stuff.

This is a simple project and I can definitely see how complex it would be to take it to production so a full fledged pinball machine...

Yeah... that kinda kills it right there:
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/511-7648-00

PPS?

To milk it one last time... I added the photoshoot with the actual Surf Champ machine on the first post.
Over and out!

I have been talking with someone who's trying to implement this project, and he pointed out a mistake I made on the schematics.
The 100 Ohm resistors are in fact 10 kOhm.
Very sorry if anyone has been trying to replicate, I must have misread the values on the resistors when I drew the schematics.

I have thought about it, but the main hurdle is the score reels. Unavailable and too noisy even if they were. The Whoa Nellie ones are way too expensive so I'd have to look into designing and producing my own.
I'm not sure that could be made cost effective.

I'm on other projects right now, but I may look into it again in a few months.

Actually,
the translite I got a little bit lazy with... I went to the staples and got one copy printed on glossy thick paper and the other one on acetate. I mostly wanted to try stuff out and see what it would look like - the initial plan was to user paper to mask areas where I didn't want light and the acetates overlayed over it. The acetate was much too transparent.
So what I ended up doing was just putting the acetate on top of the paper with no cutouts, except for the score reel holes, matching it up real good and putting that between the 2 acrylic sheets. What that does is keep the colors vibrant with the lights on, but you do see the grain of the paper.

Looks pretty good to me but if I really wanted to step it up a notch I'd have it printed with better ink on a regular translite like sheet.

Yeah you should be able to make it work with the Williams reels, you just have to make sure the Arduino is actuated the same way with the current position of each reel, I'm guessing the bakelite is different but circuitry is the same...

You built one? Let's see it!

Hey, just to be clear, I didn't mean that reply as "you wouldn't know because you didn't build one so keep your comments to yourself", but rather that I thought you actually might have built one and I would have been very interested to see it...
I guess you were just inferring though, so to answer, yes it is pretty cool. At first.
Then when you hear "click"..........."click"......."click" all night and "click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-" at midnight, not so cool.

If I ever get around to it I'll reengineer it with stepper motors. I do have some parts here that I ordered but I've been busy with my BOPP resto, among many other things. On the radar somewhere though, you never know...

Alright, alright, alright...
Pinside tells me to be careful about resurrecting this old thread - last post was 1,498 days ago, which would be a little over 4 years.
I'd been kicking around the idea of doing another iteration of the score reel clock for a some time, had some parts on hand, but never got around to it for a couple years.
Then for some reason I got interested again and got back into it.

As is the case with most or all of my pinball projects, I go at them super slow. I don't like following a thread I'm interested in that gets very few updates or that dies midway through a project, so I always try to have some progress before I start posting to try to avoid that situation.

I figure I'm pretty much at that point, so updates coming in the next weeks!

== Part II - The Legacy ==

Before we get into it, over the years I have had some people ask me for the code so that they could try the project on their end. I didn't keep track but I'd say probably 7-8 people.
Out of those, I'm not sure how many actually completed the project, but I did get some pictures from a few of them.

I'm not sure whether they're all pinside users nor what their pinside handle is, but I'll share what pictures I did get from them.
I'll assume it's ok for me to share here, feel free to chime in if these are yours and you want to comment or would rather I not post them.

Also, if any of the other people that built the project want to share what they came up with I'd be glad to see it.

First, in 2015, a gentleman called Jasper made the following:

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Wow that's awesome - were you inspired by this thread / did you use the schematics from this thread or is this an entirely independent project? Trying to figure out the actual "legacy" of this project.

Excellent. Thanks for sharing and glad I helped kickstart it!

Another gentleman named Mitch got in touch with me last year to do his version of the clock.
I see about 40 e-mails back and forth between the two of us over a few months, so had a few hiccups, but in the end he got it working.

Cool take on it with the full backglass.

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Yep, good idea - love that Harbor Lites backglass. Would probably be a much easier project too without the need to drive and actuate the reels.

Alright, I think there is probably one or two other implementations of the first clock out there, given how many times I've shared the code (although I suspect not everyone completed the project). Feel free to share if it's the case!

Now let's get to the next part.

== Part III - The Next Evolution ==

One thing I had in mind when doing the next evolution was to make it actually usable in real life. I wanted to bring the original one to put on my desk at work, but it's ridiculously large and noisy.

So that's the two main requirements right there:
-smaller size
-quiet enough that you can put it on your desk at work without driving everyone crazy

The only thing that could support these requirements was to design my own score reels, without using solenoids as actuators.

Not mad, but sometimes I set a goal for myself which is not always super practical, and I get pretty obsessed with reaching it.
A secondary goal is also to learn stuff, and I figured I would by giving that a shot.

Awesome! I had never seen any of these and frankly didn't think there were that many different ones before I got into it. The Atomic Clock is especially cool, props for that.
Somebody had mentioned it all the way back in page 1 of the thread but I had never looked it up.

I guess I could - I did use steppers, but not in that way. More to come!

But then you wouldn't get to use the side buttons, which is half the fun - but yes it would be totally doable. Although I think the Atomic Clock implementation is much cooler.

I work with top of the line electrical, mechanical and software engineers (I'm myself a software guy) so I was able to ask questions and ask for help from some colleagues.
Now obviously this is all non-work related talk, and they were all less than impressed with my little project given the crazy stuff they work on on a day to day basis so I kept that at a minimum.
You'll see as the project progresses that I eventually ended up doing everything myself even though I got help from colleagues and friends to do the first iteration of some things.

The first thing I did, and that was all the way back in late 2016 if I look at the timestamp of the picture, was have one of the mechanical engineers do a CAD design of a Gottlieb score reel.
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Right, I'd thought about it but I hadn't thought about the 100v thing... I'm sure there's some similar displays that run off lower voltage. Maybe the next project

Since I'm building the whole thing and don't need to source parts from existing machines, in theory they could be reproduced, and in theory sold. That's all in theory though, not sure the numbers would add up cost-wise, whether I'd have the time to handle it or how the licensing would work. Maybe as a kit? Stay tuned!

Well maybe the kit could include the box too
Stay tuned!

So let's go back in 2016 again...
second thing I did was order a stepper motor with the driver
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Then I took the files (SolidWorks? ProE? I forget...) that my colleague had generated, and reworked the reel so that I could pressure fit it on the shaft of the motor. I had that 3D printed at the office and it ended up looking something like this. This isn't an actual picture of the first iteration, because you can see it's mounted on some breadboard.

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In reality what then happened is that the wheel stayed in the cupholder in my car for a good 2 years and I dropped the project for some reason, which would probably take us to late 2018, early 2019.

Ok, so let's fast forward about 2 years, when one day I look at the 3D printed score reel in the cup holder and decide it's time to get going on the project again.

The plan was to to use the stepper motors, one per reel, which would fit inside the next score reel and to once again use the Arduino Nano to control the whole thing. Each stepper motor driver has one pin for power, one for ground and 4 pins for setting the position.

This would have meant 4 x 4 reels = 16 outputs, which is too many for the Arduino Nano, so I would need to once again use transistors to determine which motor is getting power at any given time, pretty much the same idea as the clock with the solenoids.
My idea was that I would send the 4 signals for position to all 4 motors all the time, but once one of them had reached the proper position the power would be cut off, thus needing 4 outputs + 4 (one for each transistor) = 8.

Stepper motors don't have absolute position, so they need a reset sequence to figure out a 0 position. The plan was to use optos and to have a blade inside the wheel which would block the light and tell the Arduino that the wheel has reached that 0 position. That's another 4 inputs which takes us to 12 I/O.

This is what an early iteration of that looked like:

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Keep in mind I'm more advanced in the project than what you're seeing, I'm going back in time a little so that the thread stays interesting.

I remember looking those up. I think it's the first idea I had. When I saw the insane price I didn't take a second look.
One thing I try not to do, from laziness and a little on purpose, is not to look too much at other implementations so that I can be more original about what I do.
I know there was also a Kings of Diamonds remake at some point with stepper score reels.
I think what I came up with is closer to that.

Here's the picture from their design, which *spoiler* looks a little bit more professional than mine :

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Too far along now to implement this, but taking notes maybe for the future! That's the downside of accumulating work before sharing, I can't really use the feedback

Thank you for the offer.
What ended up happening is that I switched to Fusion 360. More on that in coming posts.

Looking back at the pictures, I think that what got me going again on the project was when a colleague of mine returned another's 3D printer after he had borrowed it - seeing I was asking questions and interested, he asked me if I wanted to borrow it too, and that I could have it for as long as I wanted.
I think this is what gave me the idea that I could now iterate easily without using office equipment.

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So here is what my first circuit looked like

Again, as described above. The main idea is this:

-Arduino Nano runs the code.
-There are 4 driver boards, one for each stepper motor
-There are 4 transistors - the Arduino sends the signals to all 4 motors all the time, but the code determines which motors need to be running or not. This is to limit the number of needed I/O and make it possible to use the Arduino Nano. I think I started off this way because it's the same concept as the previous clock.
-There are 4 optos (directly on the board for right now), one per reel, in order to get the zero position from the reel.

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To make it simple, transistors are gates that allow current through or not. When you send them 5V, they open up and let the current through (same concept as when a coil gets energized in an EM machine and closes a normally open switch).
In SS machines, on the solenoid driver board, you have a row of them to fire the individual coils. They always have the (what is it again, 24V?) on one side, but they won't let the current through unless they get a 5V signal. When that happens the circuit closes and the coil fires.

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As for the optos, well they have the same basic functionality as a normally closed switch - they give off 5V when nothing is blocking the light, but when there is it drops to 0 to let whatever's watching the other end that's something's up.
In general in pinball it's used in some instances when a ball goes through something (for example the goal in WCS has an opto that I know of).

Here, a few things are going on:

-all the steppers are running. As you can see they're going pretty slow - since I'm doing a clock and not actual in-game score reels I don't mind if they're not snappy, but I'll try to get them running a bit faster than that later.

-I'm also testing the optos. You can see that when I block the light in the first one, the wheel stops turning. When I block the second one, the stepper at the top also stops.

Thank you!
Here's the thread: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/de-slap-shot-restoration-let-s-call-it-an-mep

With these basic tests done, I went ahead and did a first version of a breadboard prototype:

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I then set about designing a proper reel + bracket combination. I settled on Fusion 360 as the CAD tool IIRC mostly because it's the most powerful tool that offers a hobbyist licence.
After I did some testing with the optos, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the precision and repeatability (I'm not sure it was justified, there might have been error induced somewhere else in my setup). In any case, I discussed with an engineer at work who suggested I use mechanical switches instead, so I went this direction.

I also handed my schematics to this same person who set about doing the design in EAGLE that I would later be able to use to order an actual PCB of the circuit.

Here's what an early iteration of my reel + bracket looked like. I've iterated over 20 times on each of these between then and now.
I'm not sure what happened to earlier iterations either because I don't have them in Fusion 360 anymore, but I know I had done a few before that.

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You can sorta see how it all goes together here - the score reel displayed would be attached to the next bracket, and the motor in the middle is screwed to the displayed bracket. The brackets attach to one another.

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After a few days worth of 3D printing, a first prototype.

You can see I have a clearance issue here with the switch on the tens of minutes, and that the switch isn't working either.
So back to Fusion 360, then on to print another iteration.

And here's another iteration with that clearance issue fixed.

As you can see, there's still some stuff to be improved on, but I'd call this a good enough proof of concept by now.

Reels are still not spinning true, switch clearance too tight, speed could be improved, etc. At this point I'm waiting for the PCB design and I'm letting the clock run so I can see it go for days at a time (at a faster pace) to look for bugs.