Mike -
What about the Chinese market - are they into pinball?
Quoted from dasvis:Mike -
What about the Chinese market - are they into pinball?
Not at all but we are working on a few things that should attract their attention towards pinball.
Gary Stern was at the recent arcade machine show in Guangzhou and had two machines on display at his agents booth, a Ghostbusters and LOTR. I am unsure how much interest they had as I wasn't at the show but I do know they wanted 50K RMB for them (about AU$10K).
As Mike know's there's a place in HK that has a few pins, and each has a stool to sit on! Who does that?? So that's how into pinball they are!!
Quoted from blue95:Do any arcades have those Chinese made bingo machines? I saw some in Cambodia a few years back.
No because they are too close to gambling machines. The arcades here are full of ticket redemption machines just like they are everywhere else.
Quoted from pocketscience:As Mike know's there's a place in HK that has a few pins, and each has a stool to sit on! Who does that?? So that's how into pinball they are!!
Most likely because most HK natives are more familiar with the one-armed bandits and video poker machines in Macau.
Quoted from DDDwingmaster:Why are metal detector sensor not used more for ball detection? They are cheap and does not any need holes in the playfield. Why are mechanical switches still a thing in modern pinballs that create hanging balls, have wear or bent wires?
I showed my colleague who is a mechanical engineer my pinball machines. He's 28 or 29 years old and was never into pinball. Brand new world to him. He shook his head and chuckled and could not understand all the solenoids and different mechanical solutions. Everything was so archaic to him. He asked similar questions, why sensors, electronics and servos and stuff wasn't used instead to have more controllable logic without high voltage stuff. I honestly could not answer him.
Quoted from aerobert:I showed my colleague who is a mechanical engineer my pinball machines. He's 28 or 29 years old and was never into pinball. Brand new world to him. He shook his head and chuckled and could not understand all the solenoids and different mechanical solutions. Everything was so archaic to him. He asked similar questions, why sensors, electronics and servos and stuff wasn't used instead to have more controllable logic without high voltage stuff. I honestly could not answer him.
Because this archaic stuff last longer ?
Quoted from master_of_chaos:Because this archaic stuff last longer ?
And it's way, way cheaper.
Quoted from DDDwingmaster:Why are metal detector sensor not used more for ball detection? They are cheap and does not any need holes in the playfield. Why are mechanical switches still a thing in modern pinballs that create hanging balls, have wear or bent wires?
Just an aside, I like the proximity sensors too, but they don't actually eliminate hang ups. On my prototype SafeCracker (all sensors), I've several times had a ball stuck on the inlane sensor. It usually happens on flowback on the inlane and when the ball trajectory apexes exactly at the sensor, all of a sudden, floating frozen ball. It's easier to unstick than a mechanical switch though. It's kind of fun to see actually.
They also have their own wear issue, as at least Williams mounted them on inserts, so you can get typical insert wear. I'm not sure why inserts were used rather than behind wood, perhaps an issue of thickness and magnetic penetration, wood likely had to be too thin to be practical. But likely technology has improved since Williams experimented with this.
Atari used sensors instead of switches with their earliest games in the 70's, but phased them out.
Note the lack of slots for rollover switches in some of the typical spots on the playfield:
Quoted from Homepin:Metal sensors, well the cheaper ones anyway, can't detect through 1/2" of plywood reliably.
Interesting. Heighway Pinball uses inductive sensors exclusively and has no switches sticking through the playfield. It seems to be working pretty well.
Quoted from daley:Interesting. Heighway Pinball uses inductive sensors exclusively and has no switches sticking through the playfield. It seems to be working pretty well.
Like Forceflow said: Atarai used them as well but phased them out. Time will tell how well the Heighway ones work - reliability VS time and cost.
It's also about "making pinball" I have said right from the start that I am not trying to re-invent the wheel, just to make pinball. I'm taking what I believe to be the most straightforward route to having finished reliable machines. If we do introduce things that are different that will be done slowly and in a controlled situation so we can keep an eye on progress without causing too much disruption.
Anyone trying to contact us at Homepin and having emails bounce please bear with us. Our service provider has been having major problems over the past few weeks and this has now culminated in their email service virtually shutting down yesterday.
Hopefully this will all be resolved in a day or so. In the meantime, urgent messages can be sent via Facebook or PM on this site although PM's do not always get to the correct person for an answer that you might be seeking.
https://twitter.com/WebcitySupport?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Quoted from aerobert:I showed my colleague who is a mechanical engineer my pinball machines. He's 28 or 29 years old and was never into pinball. Brand new world to him. He shook his head and chuckled and could not understand all the solenoids and different mechanical solutions. Everything was so archaic to him. He asked similar questions, why sensors, electronics and servos and stuff wasn't used instead to have more controllable logic without high voltage stuff. I honestly could not answer him.
Servo driven flippers would be neat but I'd like to see your friend come up with a solution that can match the torque, speed, and cost of a solenoid.
Quoted from Homepin:We get closer and closer every day. The PCBs for the top of our Pop Bumpers were delivered today. Now we can finish the assembly of the first batch of the PB's.
I think you could get a few more LED's in there...
Quoted from daley:Interesting. Heighway Pinball uses inductive sensors exclusively and has no switches sticking through the playfield. It seems to be working pretty well.
You sure about that? Inductive switches don't work reliably when the ball is moving fast. Think of all the situations where Bally/WMS used them, it's where the ball is moving very slowly, ie ToM trunk, Roadshow dozer blade, inlanes on ToM and MB.
Quoted from Homepin:We get closer and closer every day. The PCBs for the top of our Pop Bumpers were delivered today. Now we can finish the assembly of the first batch of the PB's.
Still the coolest thread on pinside for me.
Quoted from Sonny_Jim:Inductive switches don't work reliably when the ball is moving fast
I sell sensors for a living. It all comes down to cost vs performance. I think the missed balls have more to do with the range and how the sensor is located under the playfield. Like Mike said, inductive sensors with enough range to detect the ball through a 1/2" playfield reliably will be much more expensive than a micro switch. It's also more complicated to locate because any other metal in the vicinity of the sensor and the iron content of the ball can affect range. It looks like Heighway designed their own sensor to keep cost down and also counterbored the backside of the playfield to reduce range to the ball. It's not perfect, about 1 ball out of 5 gets missed on my Full Throttle's fast inner loop (all the other sensors work 100%). There is some adjustment which seems to help but there is just too much variability to get it up to 100%. I also believe the CPU struggles and the scan time between inputs may be too long. Having an off delay built into the sensor would solve this problem. This is all just speculation on my part.
Quoted from Jgaltr56:I sell sensors for a living. It all comes down to cost vs performance. I think the missed balls have more to do with the range and how the sensor is located under the playfield. Like Mike said, inductive sensors with enough range to detect the ball through a 1/2" playfield reliably will be much more expensive than a micro switch. It's also more complicated to locate because any other metal in the vicinity of the sensor and the iron content of the ball can affect range. It looks like Heighway designed their own sensor to keep cost down and also counterbored the backside of the playfield to reduce range to the ball. It's not perfect, about 1 ball out of 5 gets missed on my Full Throttle's fast inner loop (all the other sensors work 100%). There is some adjustment which seems to help but there is just too much variability to get it up to 100%. I also believe the CPU struggles and the scan time between inputs may be too long. Just speculation on my part.
When I spoke to Romain Fontana from Heighway (pre 2016) he said the sensors were on their own boards - self calibrating and buffering their data (independent from CPU scan rate)
Quoted from MarkInc:When I spoke to Romain Fontana from Heighway (pre 2016) he said the sensors were on their own boards - self calibrating and buffering their data (independent from CPU scan rate)
Hmm then there must be a way to "teach" the sensors. Haven't found that in the menu yet - I'll reach out to Andrew HeighwayPinball and see what he says.
Our sample topper cover arrived today. A few checks on the hole sizes and positions and we are right to go with them. On Thunderbirds, ONLY pre-order buyers will receive a topper included in their purchase as was our original agreement. Toppers will not be for sale for TAG.
Naturally we will use these covers for toppers on future machines.
Our new spray painting booth is almost finished.
We added a couple of very high velocity extraction fans to improve airflow and upped the flow rate on the water curtain a little by up sizing the water feed pipes.
Just need to add a filter curtain at the doorway and we should be good to go.
I have to say This thread is awesome. Keep up the good work and documenting the process.
I hope to own one of your games one day.
Same as above,
Favorite thread the last few months.Mike is straight UP and has been open,informative,interesting and easy to reach in a couple private emails.Really pulling for Homepin-and also hope to see your Pins in the USA and here in Colorado..............like in my living room !!! Where pinball still rules )
I've mentioned this before but things are hotting up (pun intended) here in Shenzhen more recently.
There has been a few small factory fires in the area recently and the local fire department is on the warpath. They called a meeting yesterday and each factory in the area had to send a representative to a meeting to discuss fire safety and what is expected by the fire department.
About three or four hours after yesterdays meeting, yes, you guessed it, there was another fire but this time in someones dormitory. It looks a lot like someone was smoking in bed to me?
Anyway you can imagine how worked up the fire department is now, they are sending inspectors around everywhere to make sure all are complying with every single letter of the law as it relates to fire safety.
We are pretty right as we do more than is expected anyway but it's still a pain having to deal with them.
Two pictures are from the news this morning and the other two are from the meeting that we attended yesterday.
fire1 (resized).jpg
fire3 (resized).jpg
fire2 (resized).jpg
fire4 (resized).jpg
Truly amazing to see everything you have already achieved and working towards Mike, everyone says pinball is hard, but you are literally having to build it from the ground up, screws, switches, mechs etc its an amazing feat, cant wait to see the final product and if your plan is still to have the ball able to represent/replicate the Thunderbird 1, 2 and 3 launches from Tracy Island I will happily be a customer in line to support all your efforts.
So, over the last month, we have seen;
pop bumper assemblies
drop targets
switches
plungers
topper covers
and cabinets being painted
are you still assembling circuit boards in house Mike?
Quoted from PopBumperPete:are you still assembling circuit boards in house Mike?
Yes indeed but I'm being a little secretive about most of those just for the moment.
We have been busy tweaking video and audio files for licencing approval as well as fine tuning the software. Also some staff have been drawing up parts diagrams (as shown) and others are preparing things like packing box dimensions etc. as well as working out exactly what spare parts will be shipped with the initial shipments of finished machines.
Some blank PCBs that we will start assembling when the current public holiday is over here in China, shown here:
Quoted from KenLayton:Looks good. I can't wait to see playfield pictures.
I can't wait to actually play one!
I remember mike mentioning the pin will have toys/mechs that replicate the thunderbird launches from Tracy island that alone sold this pin to me I cannot wait to see it and be able to order one! Great theme! Sounds like it's shaping up to be a great game! And Mike genuinely seems like a great guy who has come through a lot and accomplished to much truely remarkable.
Quoted from NeilMcRae:are you working with ITV Studios on this?
Mike has stated previously (not in this thread), that ITV are the licensor..
I obtained the licence to build Thunderbirds Pinball from ITV
Quoted from NeilMcRae:are you working with ITV Studios on this?
Absolutely. Homepin Thunderbirds pinball is 100% licenced with the Thunderbirds owners, ITV London.
This was proven beyond doubt when the "SkitB/Predator" thing blew up and Pavlov Pinball (UK) phoned and received email confirmation from ITV that indeed, Homepin DOES have a licence to produce Thunderbirds pinball. Full Pavlov story here:
http://pavlovpinball.com/thunderbirds-pinball-may-2015-update/
The Homepin marketing manager is scheduled for a face to face meeting with ITV studios next month (June 2017) to finalise a few small details and also to sign the amendment to our licening contract for an extension due to several circumstances that have pushed back the release date of Thunderbirds.
ITV are happy with Homepin and our progress and have been excellent partners to work with on this project. I can only hope all our other current and future licence partners are as good.
We are again experiencing email issues caused by our web host (Webcity).
I believe we are able to SEND emails but we are not receiving them.
Please bear with us if you are trying to contact anyone here at Homepin on our [email protected] email addresses.
its been an issue for a while mike
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/24/enetica_outage/
Thanks for the link Doug:
**********************
Hosting service's access to .au registry suspended
24 Mar 2017 at 15:17, John Leyden
Australian web service firm Enetica has provoked consternation among customers frustrated about a prolonged outage now entering its second day.
Enetica's web hosting and domain/DNS service have been down with limited intermittent availability at best since Thursday.
The latest updates from Webcity, Enetica's parent firm, suggest techies have isolated the problem down to hardware failure. "We are currently implementing replacement equipment and in the process of deploying it," an update to Webcity's official support account on Twitter said on Friday. Support staff had earlier suggested a network outage was behind the problem in between apologising to customers and trying to dispel rumours of a security breach or DDoS attack.
"To our customers, Webcity is a functioning entity. The outage being experienced isn't a security breach & your data hasn't been compromised," support staff said.
Complaints from customers on social media and in a thread on Reddit are piling the pressure on Enetica.
"Our website & emails are completely down due to an issue with our domain provider @WebcitySupport/#enetica," said one aggrieved user.
El Reg learned of the ongoing problems from an Australian reader.
"[There's] still no 'actual' information as to whether this is a massive DDoS attack, hardware failure, config issue etc but the initial report of the problem on website's twitter feed was 17:00 on 22nd March," our tipster told us.
Enetica hosts more than 23,000 websites, according to figures from Builtwith.com. Most of its customers are SMEs.
Quoted from Homepin:Our animators were playing around this afternoon........
» YouTube video
Video unavailable?
Quoted from rubberducks:Video unavailable?
Works for me and I'm in China where Youtube is blocked? (I'm using a VPN of course).
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