Awesome thread and I love that you’re looking at the science of this. Sorry for the long post, so skip it unless you’re interested in the science behind this.

1. Some people have mentioned REACTION time of humans being on the order of 200ms. This is not what the OP is trying to demonstrate by measuring the flipper delay and reaction time has absolutely nothing to do with controlled pinball flips. I say controlled flips, because of course reaction time would play a small part in determining the trajectory of the ball once it rebounds off a sling or post or other object and heads off in a different possibly unknown direction at a high speed. Reaction time is measured as response to an unknown timed stimulus. For example, in the link above (Post #38), the user is asked to tap the screen when the green color appears. But the timing of the green is unknown so you are just “reacting” and this is why it takes 200ms or more to tap the screen. In reality, the subject of hitting a flipper when a ball reaches a certain spot on the flipper is TIMING and NOT REACTION TIME. This is similar to what the OP states in post #45.

2. Neurophysiology research doesn’t always agree on what that the limit of human TIMING is, but there is at least one paper (google Hore and Watts) that indicates that the neurophysiological timing is on the order of 1ms for skilled major league pitchers that have to TIME the release of the ball of their fingertips in order to hit a target 90 feet away at 100mph. It’s interesting to note that other papers demonstrate on the order of 9ms for average humans.

3. But, it’s not the timing delay in the remakes that would potentially be a problem to the top skilled players, because they would just include this delay in their brain when doing the internal “calculations” and adjust their timing such that they flip at the nearly exact moment they want to... well, within 1ms if they’re as skilled as some major league pitchers... and there’s no reason to believe they aren’t just as skilled in their TIMING. The real problem would be that if the delay in the flipper response introduced by the circuitry isn’t consistent. The OP states that there is a standard deviation on the order of 1.5ms and this is exactly the problem if you are a person that has a consistent TIMING response on the order of 1ms. It means that for Keith Elwin who plans to hit the flipper within 1ms of when he wants to, he is really hitting it within about 2.5-3ms of when he wants to.

4. Does any of this make a difference??? Well, I haven’t calculated the ball speed down the flipper (from a cradled position) to see how much distance it travels in 2.5ms. That is the next exercise...

As others have already said (in admittedly much shorter posts), I doubt I’ll ever notice with my average 9ms timing brain... but the timballs of the world may notice!!

Edit: Doh timballs... you posted yours a few seconds before I finished typing. Must be your advanced timing skills.

And I even referenced you while writing my research paper post. Ha.

@twenty84, it’s probably just my eyes (or my ignorance), but are you triggering off the EOS connection on the flipper coil in picture 5?

Sorry... didn’t mean trigger I guess. What is the lead in picture 5 connected to on the solenoid?

Yes, I was aware of the high and low power (hold current at EOS) but I was thinking you were connected to the low power for some reason when I was looking at the pic. Like I said, must have been my eyes. I thought the low power was the center lug based on some diagrams I saw on the old interwebs... can’t trust that I’m sure.

This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier post. I wasn’t sure the leads were hooked to the proper parts of the flipper circuit. Not sure it makes a difference though.

You’re on the right path and thanks for doing the math. But I think you introduced a factor of two accidentally here. The total variance is 3.5ms, which means 1.75ms from the mean. So, it would be 1/8th inch sooner or later from one shot to the next (from the intended mean). Ok, it’s not so much in your math as in your phrasing of “1/4 inch sooner or later” which makes it sound like a total spread of 1/2 inch depending on how you read it.

As for my wife, she would say that's about the time it takes for me to start the search for my next pin after I've just bought/setup the current one...

As a few others have said... you have nothing to feel bad about. It's human nature to make mistakes and that's what peer review is for (similar to scientific journals). I think those of us that appreciate the science realize that a small mistake can happen to all of us... I'd be lying if I said I hadn't made bigger mistakes than this. Of course, it's fear of this failure that keep people from trying new things. I say keep trying and I definitely learned a lot from this thread.