Love this thread! So great to see how much progress you guys are making and how steady it's all going. I'm in the planning process of making my own machine (mostly need to wait for life to calm down in a couple months), so I'm sure I'll spend many, many hours scouring over this thread to get helpful tips. You guys are at a much better starting point -- you seem to have a really great grasp on the mechanical side of things and have mentioned that you're not programmers. I'm on the opposite side -- I'm an electrical engineer and have been programming for 25 years, so I'm planning on designing my own electronics boards and writing all my own software and feel very comfortable doing all of that, but the mechanical elements and builds will take a lot of growing pains. Time for me to learn how to weld! lol

Thanks for sharing this with the community. I'll be keeping up as much as the rest of the group. Keep doing what you're doing! You're inspiring!

Yes, I'm definitely going to buy a cheap machine and scavenge for parts and obviously the cabinet. My main issue is that I haven't had much luck finding ultra cheap ones (~$500) that are SS. I can find some EMs, but I don't feel I'll get as much out of them, just the cab, some light sockets, things like that. I'm waiting around for a cheap SS, but I will probably just have to bite the bullet and get an EM.

As far as making my own driver and controller boards, that's part of the fun for me and I think I could do it for about as cheap (or cheaper) than a P-ROC. I spent a lot of enjoyable hours architecting how all the electronics would come together and communicate that turns out to be pretty similar to SPIKE. I've got the PCBs designed, I just haven't sent them out to be fabbed yet. By building the same functionality in to a larger number of physically much smaller PCBs (~3"x4"), you can save a lot on cost, you just have to make sure they all communicate with each other properly, and that's right in my wheelhouse. The only thing I may use an off-the-shelf controller for is the DMD -- there's a lot of development there that I just wouldn't be interested in doing. It looks like you guys were able to get in some great graphics in there with relative ease.

I like your idea of having a predetermined time to work on it. That seems to help you make continual progress. It's just me working on my project, but having a set time would still help stay on task. You will finish yours far faster than mine will be, but I'm looking forward to getting into the guts of it!

Minions pinball updates have started. Well, there goes my productivity at work for the rest of the day.....