Thank you so much @DickHamill. I saw your post on Reddit about this a couple of months ago, and since then have been obsessed with doing this mod. I bought a Stars about three weeks ago and even as a complete Arduino noob followed your detailed instructions and got it working. Anyone on the fence about it, just do it! I think I spent about 20 bucks on parts and made it happen. As a noob, I will advise other novices that if you're using a Chinese Arduino clone, use the old bootloader option in Tools/Processor in the Arduino IDE. I struggled with this for days. I used a cheap shield from amazon that breaks the pins out to screw terminals. The Inland Arduino starter kit that came from Micro Center had everything else I needed to get it running. I cut the female/female patch cables in half and used them to connect to the pins on the J5 one at a time. Also for noobs like me: the J5 pins are numbered from right to left. It's a quick and dirty setup, but it works like a champ. I've been looking all over for an option to make a 32 pin female connector but to no avail. I bought some 40 pin female headers to use as a connector, but soldering wire directly onto header pins is no fun at all. I have a Wav Trigger coming tomorrow and hopefully with the help of some of the more knowledgeable users here on Pinside will have custom sounds/music added soon.

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ForceFlow : Good looking out. The pic is a bit deceiving from that angle. The damage is old and the battery is fairly new. If I keep the Arduino in there permanently I might just delete it as the Arduino keeps the high score for the Stars 2020 code.

DickHamill : I love the rule set you've created! Even if you don't change a thing I'd still keep it. Knowing that I love the code and don't want to complain, a fresh set of eyes might have seen something you haven't. What I've noticed is:

1) The slingshots don't score. I believe you might have their 10 points tied to the spinner.

2) The spinner always scores 10 points above how much they should per star lit. I think that might be why you find it so noisy. The 10 point chime goes off at the same time as whatever value it is currently lit for (210, 1010, 2010, etc.).

3) There is no Tilt support.

These are all just nitpicky quality of life issues, the rules and code are incredibly fun. I like the skill shot, and Stars should've always had a ball save. I'm afraid I screwed up my setup today removing it to tap into the power to run another Arduino for a little 8x32 dot matrix screen. Manually installing the individual pins was just a proof of concept anyway. I've got the 40 pin headers, I just need to get a pcb to mount them as soldering individual wires was more trouble than it was worth.

Man @dickhamill, you've been putting in work over there! I tried to upload your new sketch, but I'm stuck on the Wavtrigger.h file. I have a wav trigger, but haven't even started working with it yet. Did you finish the sound implementation already? I'd love to try the new code immediately, so is there some sort of placeholder I can use to check out the new code until I get the wav trigger ready?

Thanks for the link to the 32 pin prototype board in the shopping list btw. It was perfect for a more permanent solution. Please don't judge my sloppy soldering. It works.

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@keith20mm: What size SD card did you use? If I remember correctly, the wav trigger only recognizes a relatively small card. I don't remember the maximum size, but I think it was 2 or 4 GB. I only had a 32 gig card on hand, but used some fancy software to format it to the size it wanted.