Hi all,

Carrying over a discussion from r/pinball on this topic. I’ve got a way to make the doll interact directly with game events that I was able to proof-of-concept last night (along with some other cool and completely unrelated stuff!). It comes with a laundry list of caveats and minor details to figure out, but it should work. The bad news is that it’s pretty technical to get it all working correctly and can bork your game if you screw something up. It should be fairly simple to put a kit or something together with either a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino/ESP2866 plus a few other bits, but it’s going to take some dev time to polish it.

Anyway, the question I asked on reddit was if there’s a consensus on what the doll “should” do, because unless I wrote a bunch of custom software to make it user-configurable it’s kind of a one-and-done thing. So with that in mind, what does the wishlist of “when X happens, the doll should do Y” look like?

Also, question about the Pro model: since there’s no magnet, is there any animation or anything for the mystery award or does it just happen? Technically the time the magnet holds onto the ball on the Premium/LE counts as a “mode” which is easy to trigger, but I don’t know if there’s anything comparable on a Pro.

Oh yeah, also would anyone be willing to chop up a doll and donate it to the cause? I can do the software side but the cutting and mounting is the part I’m hopeless at, lol.

Others have said that they don't want him to move in attract mode though, so the differences of opinion are what I'm interested in since it's likely going to be a "one size fits all" solution (or at least very minimally configurable).

Also, I managed to find a doll locally (very last one at a Best Buy about 30 minutes away) so hopefully I can start hacking away at him today after I go pick it up later.

And by "hacking," I mean software. I still don't want to chop him up, so I'll trade someone for a chopped-up one if you want. haha

Ooh, maybe it would be fun to have him “sleep” until you coin up, at which point he could do a little dance and raise his hand out since he loves shiny objects.

Headed out to grab the doll now, I may throw up a stream on Twitch later while I fiddle with it if anyone wants to watch.

And awaaaaay we go!

D3587EF7-3796-45C7-BE79-E6FB6F34BD42 (resized).jpeg

Give it til Friday, progress is actively being made.

btw, you could easily do this with a simple PNP transistor.

Cool, although I don’t think this thread counts as an “acejedi-specific” thread. In fact, if I may be so bold, I find his approach lacking in some very significant ways that could use improvement. However, he showed us how to chop the doll in half and make it stay put, so he deserves as much credit as anyone.

tl;dr - I’m not sure your thing warrants its own thread, and it honestly smacks a bit of shameless self-promotion.

Been working on this in fits and starts, trying to document the majority of it on stream aside from minor things like soldering, etc. Haven’t had a solid block of multiple hours to devote to it yet but I’m very pleased with the progress. http://www.twitch.tv/insanity_falls if you wanna follow along, I think out loud a lot and explain what I’m doing so you might accidentally learn a bit of electronics along the way!

As best I can tell, the magnet stays active until another switch is validated. I’m about to get to work on mine again, I’ll pull the glass off and test for ya while I’m at it.

Magnet update: it stays active until a rollover is validated or until it no longer detects the ball, at which point it awards “D” no matter where the ball ends up going.

Also, you could get the 5v@1A via the USB ports on the CPU node board without having to fiddle with buck converters. You might also be able to get it off the pins of CN8, but I don’t know how much current draw those can handle. Would have to do some testing.