I do the sensor under my largest insert in the lower segment of my playfield also. One of the modes is hydra battle where the player has to hit the low center insert about 18 times with it adding additional balls every 4 hits all without loosing a ball. I’ve only done it once.

The new mini-playfield shoots well. Here is a one minute video of play on it before I re-mounted it to the main playfield. Have a look.

Thanks. My meanwell power supply runs at 48v. The magnet pulses up to 100 ms or until the ball crosses the edge of the magnet. One feature I am trying to solving in code is to have the magnet catch the ball and deliberately reverse its direction. I can’t get it to happen but the spar it is not reliable. The purpose is to keep the player guessing as to which tunnel the ball will come out of and how fast it will be going.

Yes. That’s exactly it. Catch the ball and if you’re going uphill drop it and then fling it back again. But you have to have a rule in place that if it doesn’t clear the magnet on the fling not to keep trying over and over again.

I found I needed a minimum of four optical switches to make this work.
Switch—switch—Magnet—switch—switch
The first switch fires the magnet. The second switch is positioned at the edge of the magnet and turns off the magnet if the pulse is still going. The other two switches are for the same thing when coming the other direction.

Thanks! It’s even better when installed under the transparent monitor. MPF superimposes GIFs of bats flying over the playfield as the ball enters and leaves the tunnels. Also it flashes points over the targets when they are hit.

For now, I'm thinking of the graphics over the mini playfield as placeholders. The flying bats, crawling bugs and Stalactites/mites are functional and even amusing. But, eventually I would like to port the graphics over to Unity for something truly eye popping.

It’s looking like Solid State Pinball is going to have a pinball play area at Planet Comicon this year, April 22-24 at Bartle Hall, downtown Kansas City Missouri. https://planetcomicon.com/
I am refreshing the code and fixing up the diverters which gave me a bit of trouble at Expo. I’m hoping to get hundreds of games on Greek Gods at Comicon. There’s even talk of a tournament. Celebrity maker Adam Savage will be doing photo ops and pictures. It would be fun if he stopped by.

I am working out a couple minor hardware bugs to get Greek Greek ready for the next show. The left side wireform lock has been trouble. The plugs I used projected slightly into the ball path and too many brushes with the ball caused the connection to fail. The fix was to wire the lock’s circuit board directly with a ribbon cable. I’m using the opportunity to replace the LEDs with Pinball Life GI RGB LEDs. These are much brighter than the 5 mm Adafruit ones I originally put on. The ribbon cable comes through the playfield and connects to a breakout board with a plug. All is tight and connections are made.

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Hey everybody! Greek Gods will be at the Kansas City Comicon this weekend April 22 to 24th. Solid State Pinball has a pinball area of machines from Solid State plus machines from local pinball enthusiasts. For people who played Greek Gods in Chicago (or in my basement), I promise better games since I've been steadily tuning up the rules, software, light shows and mechanicals. See you there!

Greek Gods is up and running Friday - Sunday at Planet Comicon in Kansas City. It’s part of an exhibition area with 15 machines. GG is on free play along with Shrek and LED Zeplin. Inside the pay to play area are a bunch of great machines including TNA and a P3. Hope to see people there.

On location at Planet Comicon in Kansas City This weekend.

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Greek Gods played flawlessly all day -no crashes from MPF, all of the switches and hardware for working properly. I couldn’t be happier with the P3-Roc / MPF platforms. I stayed up last night coding new hooks for music that I composed on the OP-Z synth. The music and updated software is uploaded to github and ready to pull into the machine when I get to the convention center later this morning.

Had my first repair: The nut fell off of the flipper button. Easy Peasy. This thing is getting hammered today.

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Firing up Greek Gods at home after Comicon found that the PCIe graphics adapter had come unseated from the motherboard. This is a recurrent problem since I did not have room for a proper MOBO case and back plane to screw it into position. The monitor sits just in front of the MOBO and hits against the graphics adapter. At some point the monitor is going to press and to crack a tracing on my MOBO. So I decided to move the graphics adapter with a Corsair Premium PCIe x16 3.0 Extension Riser Cable. I did not know about these 30 cm cables that let you put a graphics adapter in an unconventional location. For my setup I mounted the Raedon directly against the back of the back box and pull air from the room. It looks nice and tidy with a 3d printed screen.

Now that I'm up and running again, I checked the audits. 3 days of Comicon recorded 860 start button presses. In all the games, I only had to adjust an opto, tighten the nut on my flipper button and restart MPF a couple times because the slides were getting sluggish. All and all a great showing.

I’ve been quietly developing the next phase of the Greek Gods homebrew pinball project. For the last 9 months I’ve been learning the OP-Z, Teenage Engineering’s synthesizer/sequencer. Weekly lessons with Davnak, an electronic music artist, producer and OP-Z guru have born fruit. This week I installed my original music into Greek Gods and will debut it next week in Chicago at Pinball Expo. I hope to see many familiar faces from last years show. Come give Greek Gods a play - and a listen.

Original music is just one of the changes on Greek Gods. Last year, the light shows were rudimentary not really taking advantage of the machine’s 768 RGB LEDs. I hadn’t yet tapped the potential of MPF’s display_light_player. This is a fantastic little corner of the framework. It takes a map of the position of each of the LEDs and uses them as pixels, controlling them as if they were part of a giant (low res) monitor. The upshot is that any graphic element, shapes, sweeps, rotating bars, etc. can be played live across the playfields LEDs. It made it super easy to create very complex, dynamic light shows that change with the game variables.

It is similar to show creator. Both take the LED positions. In Show creator you provide a shape and a direction for that shape to moves across the map. Then show creator generates the yaml for a show that can be played by MPF. The difference is that display_light_player runs live during your game and becomes a target for slides and widgets. Anything that can be displayed in real time with Kivi can be sent to display_light_player, even video. Want a flame pattern sent to the playfield lights? Just find a gif and put it on a slide. display_light_player does the rest. The images from display_light_player ride on top of the normal lights and don't interfere with other shows. The player never knows it's there until a wild sweep or swirl pattern whooshes through the playfield.

For those unfamiliar, the OP-Z is a small handheld synthesizer and sequencer. Through professional EM creators regard Teenage Engineering's OP-1 and OP-Z as "toys" they are surprisingly capable, particularly for a newbie like me looking for some 80's or early 90's style arcade themes. I hope the people at Expo like it!

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It certainly comes at a price premium. They seem to style themselves after Apple in that respect. But it’s been a solid performer. I’ve used the hell out of it over the last 10 months and if continues to function as designed.

1 day left to polish up the code before I take the head and legs off Greek Gods and slide it into the back of the SUV for the long trip to Chicago. Because the machine uses physical ball locks on the ramps, some of the side missions can’t run if there is a ball locked. Today I’m experimenting with some new code to be more permissive in this respect. I’m hoping that more people will hit the side missions which I think are a lot of fun.

A few hours of coding and play testing has paid off. Now with a little practice average to good players can reach the hydra battle and goddess multiball. Game scores should be considerably higher this year with those modes played.

Last year Greek Gods had a few mechanical issues I was unable to resolve at Expo. The biggest one related to the lower playfield requiring a 8 degree tilt on the machine. The steep tilt not only made the game a bit too fast but it required a spot-on, full force shot to move the captive ball from the far left of the playfield to the far right. Since the captive ball controls the ramp diverter, the game just does not work without that shot. Clearly the old lower playfield had to go. With the redesign of the lower playfield the slope of the machine is now best at 6.5 making the power ball shot work and very satisfying to hit.

The machine has a slide deck of instructions for how to play the game. This slide discusses the powerball.

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Final code is pushed to the machine. I reduced the qualification score for the lower play field bonus game, where the player can redeem their soul from the underworld and earn an extra ball. This should allow for more exciting games for the novice players.

To improve stability, I reduced logging to minimal. Hours and hours of play can create a huge log file, and eventually crash the system. since logging is still turned on I will have to periodically restart the game just for fun I queried the project folder for the total number of lines of yaml code: >97,000. The programming has grown by about a third since last expo.

Greek Gods High Score Pinball Expo Contest:
First second and third prize.

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Whew.... I was afraid somebody would pick a fight over which sauce was worthy of 1st place!