This.

It's why I keep trying to recommend it, because I really didn't understand it until I got one too. Now I couldn't go back to not having the ability to model what I need and just have it appear minutes to hours later, because it's so genuinely useful in so many ways. It changes your thinking almost, you have this new muscle you have to learn to use.

I'd like to have those mudflaps. My next machine will need oodles of them. Going to do a clear backglass with a marble run in it with an elevator from the bottom of the cabinet and a drop out to the second tier playfield.

I am also not a woodworker, but i feel like wood is an awesome material, and like mbecker said, that goes for wood too. Of course any heavy machine will make the product better, but you can cut it with a jigsaw and make it work. That is the beauty of homebrew, you can go as deep and professional as money, skill and time allows, but it doesn't have to be a production piece to be fun. My jigsaw gets heavy use, couldn't do without it.

Totally have the same opinion! I don't think a 3d printer is essential. But it is an amazing tool, that really changes how you start to go at a new project. Before i had a 3d printer, i made gamepads with a microcontroller, and raspberry pi handheld consoles, with wood, plastic sheets, resin and parts from snes controller housings. I loved those projects, but it was always obvious that it was handmade.. With a 3d printer everything gets a little bit more professional. So i definitely recommend one, it is an advanced tool that will improve your projects.

Has anyone here considered flexible clear pvc in place of wire ways? Thinking of going that route on the next build with brackets to hold its shape. It comes in different wall thickness so sagging wouldn't be an issue if supported correctly. Just a thought, may buy a couple feet, and experiment. Would look cool with leds on the far end, lighting it like optic fiber.

My background is a little different. I've been a mechanical engineer for almost 25 years. I had access to resin printers early in my career at work, but it wasn't until about 6-7 years ago when 3d printers finally dropped to that magical price of $600 that I was like "Hmm, I use them at work all the time, maybe I should make the leap". Even for me, it wasn't long before I was like "how the hell did I live without having one". I make lots of mods, but I don't know how many times I need something around the house (even a jig to drill a hole). Yes I get that people can "fabricate it out of wood or metal", but there's nothing like quickly modeling something up, and just hitting print (and it will be perfect as your model). Even at my job, if the end goal is to make something out of metal, I will always always 3d print a mockup with low infill just for a fit check before wasting a machinist's time cutting metal. You can simulate any assembly in solidworks, but often you miss something (a part wasn't modeled accurately, something wasn't assembled the same, you didn't realize a motion would cause a crash, etc)

Got my power mostly sorted out. Williams transformer, Data East wiring harness.
5v and 50v are solid. Feed those two into my cobrapin, and I should be good to go.
Added external wires for the pc power switch so that I can control it with either Danesi's board or a homebrew, depending on how ambitious I get.

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Decided to install voltage monitors in my cabinet.
No guessing on whether I have the correct voltages at a glance.
Simple, and low cost.

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Nice! I was contemplating that. Should have done it.

Anyway, got the system booting today. Test attract mode was working fine.

Hello everyone !
I hope i'm on the right thread, but i'm struggling to find pictures and explanation off the way to "lay" and fix the playfield inside the cabinet.
Eventually i'd like to use a system "adjustable", if i made some mistake with the angle.
I have an idea with a screw and an insert for climbing wall.

Do you have some pictures of your system ?
Thank's for your help !

If I'm reusing a Williams WPC cabinet, I will use that mounting system.
Otherwise, I use the stern slides. You can see them in these two pictures, though I installed them backwards(I'll reverse them before installing the playfield). I used an existing cabinet as a pattern, but they are simple to install.

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Cobra, FAST or Multimorphic? Which is the way to go? I know they are all good, but help me decide between them!

I haven't messed with Fast's new stuff, but my short opinion

Cobra: best bang for the buck

FAST/P3-ROC: very comparable in features and design. P3 supports a few more coding languages if you don't want to use MPF. P3 also supports parallel and serial lamp lighting, which I think is unique to the P3-ROC system? P3 costs a bit more though.

I originally chose P3-ROC primarily because it had far better documentation, but Fast seems to have caught up in that regard from a glance at their website.

tl;dr they're all good...pick what fits your budget and schedule

Quick clarification on FAST: You can use whatever programming language you want. It does not have to be Python or MPF. (Pedretti does not use MPF for their Rudy’s Nightmare game, for example.) The hardware interface is just serial commands over USB, so any hardware and/or programming language that supports serial is fine. That said, most homebrewers use MPF, but we also have several people who have written or are writing their own non-Python based frameworks which we fully support as well.

I won’t comment on how FAST compares to other platforms since I’m part of the FAST team, but I will say thanks TreyBo69 for the shout out on the docs. (https://fastpinball.com/docs) Writing all our guides and drawing our diagrams is my main job at FAST and I’m super proud of them, so thanks!!

My suggestion would be to dive in an learn as much as you can about all the platforms before you decide, because this project is going to be many years long, so you’re really choosing a multi-year relationship with your hardware platform and that ecosystem.

Yay for more pinball in the world whatever you decide!

I'll addon that I like the new Fast boards require only 48V and 12V rails vs needing 48/12/5 rails

I'm curious. Does Fast support coils at voltages other than 48V? My first project was an EM retheme that I kept on 24V on the P3 system. I assume Fast can do a range of coil voltages, but I don't know

Yes. (Any voltage from about 12-90VDC give or take.) You can even mix and match voltages on the same I/O board. (Which is nice for the few 12V coils you might have here and there to work alongside the 48V ones.)

I would pick whatever is going to get you the most community support, unless you have specific needs that one or the other trumps. Cost for instance is a fair one if you're on a budget. Probably Cobra for that. Unless you're really on a tight budget I wouldn't make that the prime consideration though. Always gonna be costs, but paying with your time is a really big one. Pick what respects your time.

If you have friends or local people using a platform who might be able to help you for instance that's a good reason to get in bed with the same one. That's gonna vary by personal situation.

I saw in one of the other homebrew threads recently (might have been the SLC Punk one?) that someone said the PRoc Slack channel is pretty dead now, is there an active community for that somewhere else? A place to ask questions is super helpful.

I would personally use FAST because they're active here, Brian is serious about the documentation, and I personally know Aaron so I feel super confident I could get the support I need, but I think they have a pretty active Slack channel too.

Google Groups are hot trash. GitHub is slightly better, but that's hardly a rousing endorsement.

I think it's slightly unfortunate that the communities are separated by hardware platforms tbh. How many of the questions people have are really that specific?

I agree with this last part 100%. So many of the same and similar questions and discussions in slack channels. I wish thise could be merged but just keep the hardware specific channels. I can’t keep up with both slack channels, mpf is split now between GitHub and googlegroups, I think there’s a homebrew discord channel, and then discussions on Facebook as well as here.

The slack dilemma is both the PROC and FAST slacks are limited to 3 months or so of history due to the cost of paying for unlimited. So the same questions happen over and over.. I’ve had to ask the same question because I forgot to take notes or screenshot the first time.

Oh man Mbecker and Aurich YES!

I love Slack, but it sucks that it pulled everything out of the public view. For the hardware vendor-specific stuff, I get it, but for things that are universal, like MPF, or how to make cabinets, or bend wire, or how to glue inserts... I wish all that was in public and not locked in private Slack groups. Even for MPF I try to get people in our Slack group to use the public MPF channels, but.. Slack is so dang easy! (I don't fault them for this at all!)

There is technically an MPF Slack group, (I think avanwinkle told me about it, I probably haven't been there in 5+ years?), but then that's ANOTHER thing to login to and manage and it doesn't solve the 90 day problem.

Which, OMG, the 90 day problem. So in the FAST Slack we have like 150 people. We reached out to Slack to see if we could pay to keep all our messages. They came back with a quote for like $1k per month but would give us a kicker for like $500/mo for the first six months. hahahahahha I about fell out of my chair. I was like, "Yeah you people really don't understand the pinball market"

I think Teams is way cheaper (possibly built in to a Windows 365 sub) but everyone I dangled the idea of Teams to just assumed I was joking and quickly changed the subject.

So my approach has been for me to try to "take notes" essentially and get everything captured and published into real documentation. But of course I'm only focused on some things and really that's not scalable.

Hopefully the long term solution will be to point a ChatGPT-like thing at the whole mess and tell it to "read this and be a tech support robot now". But until then, I guess we're stuck with forums?

Speaking of forums, and specifically the MPF split between Google Groups and GitHub: First, let me say that is 100% my fault! Back when I picked Google Groups for the MPF Users forum, Groups was pretty good. Now it's horrible. (You can't even post code snippets!?!!!!??!! What year is this???) So I wanted to move us over to GitHub Discussions so we can more closely tie to the MPF development and issues there. So I turned that on, but then I learned that GitHub Discussions has limitations too (specifically around email notifications and subscriptions, details here: https://github.com/orgs/missionpinball/discussions/8). So now we have two support locations and none which are 100%

If anyone has a suggestion for a free way to host the MPF support forum that is not Google Groups or GitHub Discussions, I'd love your thoughts.

I'd just use Discord. It has a superior interface compared to Slack (I would kill for Slack to have Discord replies instead of the awful thread feature). It's not locked down like Slack, very easy to have a public server if you want, or barring that invites are easier for private servers.

The new forum feature in Discord doesn't replace a true forum, but it is an easy way to silo specific reoccurring topics so they aren't drowned out by real time chat.

It's free, and the extra features (like larger file uploads) are on the user side, so the costs, if any, are covered by individuals in cheap month subscriptions and not borne by the people running the server.

I'm in Slack and Discord all day long every day, and Discord is so much better in almost all ways imo. Slack is for companies who need to pay for things like compliance. We have a paid Slack server and we don't have data retention at all because it's just fodder for discovery for lawsuits. So ironic.

I moderate a large Discord server (about 8,000 members) and run my own private server for my arcade, if you need any help I'm pretty familiar with setting things up.

https://discord.gg/Xzb3HhbB

I have a Discord channel here with some members that have already joined. I have it broken up into different aspects of homebrew:

Mission Pinball
Design
3D Printing
Wiring
LED Show

My intention is to overtime to start adding pinned coding examples in the mission pinball and ledshow part; as well as the 3d printed. The biggest issue with Discord is, if unpaid, you're limited to how big of an image or file that can be attached. As of now, I haven't needed a reason to have multiple moderators on there but am open if someone would like to be one.

I've been coding on my Arzach for weeks using MPF. After getting a few game features working my confidence is building up and I've tackled some bigger items like game achievements, sound, light, and video timing. This is the first week where I feel like I know what I'm doing. After going thru MPF school for the last couple of months it's starting to make sense! One game feature at a time. Once it's solid, then move on to the next. Soon you can start copy/paste. The MPF website was a little daunting at first but everything you need seems to be there. I suppose I would have liked to have seen more game examples but then someone else's game code might get you into trouble and then you have to disassemble it anyway. More than happy to share my code as it is so far. My CobraPin controller is doing a fine job running the 150 or so RGB LEDs and hardware.

For coding, I tackle the easiest items and base items first. Ball save, mode selects, base mode scoring, skillshot, as I find these are easier. Then move on to the harder items in the modes. I am still learning stuff every day in MPF and have been doing it for almost a year now.

May I suggest learning the basic of a code repository like github? You check in your code, then update it every time you make a change. It can show you everything you changed in a commit, and you can back out changes, make branches to test ideas, etc, while not forcing you to make manual backups and such. It can be daunting, but for most people, an hour of work up front can save you weeks of time in the project.
I keep my code in github.com. Some is private, some public. If I'm helping someone with code, we can comment on each other's code and we don't have to manually send things to each other. It makes life much easier.

+1000000 to recommend using Git or some other SVN for your MPF code & configs.

For those who want to see other peoples' MPF code & configs to learn from, GitHub has a wonderful and advanced search feature, where you can (for example) search for specific text in code snippets across all projects on all of GitHub, including the ability to filter by file type.

Here's an example searching for "driverboards" (a somewhat unique word that will be in every MPF project) while limiting the search to only include .yaml files: https://github.com/search?l=YAML&q=driverboards&type=Code

That search turns up 128 MPF projects, many for homebrew machines featured in other Pinside threads (Spaceballs, Brooks & Dunn, Metroid, Charlie's Angels, Mass Effect 2....) Also these seem to be pretty evenly spread across Cobrapin, FAST, and P3-ROC.

For writing the code & configs for your MPF-based games, I love Microsoft Visual Studio Code (cross platform and free), and I pay the $100/year for GitHub CoPilot (AI-powered autocomplete helper), which has been trained on all of GitHub and actually kinda-sorta understands MPF config files nowadays. (*Not perfectly, but I find myself saying, "Damn... I'm impressed!" way more often than I say, "Nice try but wrong!")

A lot of that depends on how you code(platform, editor, etc). I use Linux command line mostly, with vim as an editor, so what I do is pretty weird for most non- Linux people.
Create an account on github.com then start here
https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/hello-world

That gets you up and running on github itself. Then, it's a matter of checking your existing code into a repo and integrating it with your editor. How are you writing code today?

EDIT: try this video out

I second Brian's recommendation of MS Visual Studio Code, very handy to use, even as a non-programmer type like myself.. I do also use github, but probably not how it is supposed to be used.

Mudflaps Bigg thank you for the parts. I really appreciate the kindness.

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A good guy helping a good guy!

Could robin maybe create a MPF section here under homebrew?

Fair warning if you look at the Spaceballs code, I switched to a private repo when the game was like 25% done, so the code that shows up in the public github repo is really old and incomplete. I moved to a private repo because I store all the audio/video assets in the repo as well and didn't want to get in trouble for just publicly posting movie clips and sounds online where anyone could get them.

If you're not already using it, checkout git lfs. It's generally what you want to use when storing binary assets.

BrianMadden

I haven't run a forum in 20 years so I have no idea what modern system requirements would be. If they're low you may be able to get away with using GCP free tier.

https://cloud.google.com/free

I feel like I'm listening to a seminar on enzymes, and protiens... I have less than no clue what's going on now, so I'm going to bow out of this thread. I'm definitely not in the level of homebrew you guys are in, so this won't pertain much to me anymore. Enjoy, and have a great weekend all.

I'd echo any suggestions of Discord over Slack, I find Discord is just the better program to interface with, and then on top of that you get to keep all your message history for free instead of losing it after 90 days.

Did we lose Pinballmakers.com? It has been a great resource, but I am unable to reach the website. And what is the best place for CobraPin controller info? I checked out MPF. It appears to have beefed up the CobraPin details. I was considering adding some high intensity flash Leds to my Arzach machine for the pop bumpers and slingshots. Anyone have a suggestions for parts and integration? So many questions...

Weird i can also not reach it. Pinballmakers is the best site for homebrewers.