There are ways to prevent that. If you add the tag "home" to a device it will consider those balls to be home. Otherwise it will collect. If that logic is fine for you there is no need to write any code.

Jan

Hey Nate,

Awesome writeup about your learning. Would you like to contribute a few sections to the MPF documentation about that? http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/physical_building/layout_considerations.html. Seems like a lot of your posts can go right there. What do you think?

Jan

I guess what he meant: Besides off the shelf parts, an off the shelf control system, a custom cut playfield with print, a computer, screen, cabinet and much more you also need to machine some custom parts. I would expect the bill of material to be somewhere between 6 and 12k in total plus all your own work and tools you might need. Not an impossible project but certainly would take a lot of dedication over a longer time with a decent budget.

I like physical locks. That an awesome multiball!

You got a physically working machine with actual modes programmed. I guess you got the hard things figured out. If you don't like full display art stuff just go with DMD style. Either a real DMD (Smartmatrix or FAST DMD) or just LCD with dotfilter similar to NBX. DMD is much less work than HD graphics. I personally would not recommend HD graphics unless you like to work with that kind of stuff. Playfield art is much simpler than you would expect. Try something like Inkscape. Draw separating lines, add colored areas and put a few graphics on top. Then keep iterating until you like it.

Jan

If you define a standard interface that would certainly work. Then APC is a platform running on an Arduino which implements the LISY protocol. There you go Arduino working with MPF out of the box .

More seriously: We could design a serial interfaces for stuff like that. On the other hand it ain't too hard to hook some python code into MPF via a plugin, scriptlet or mode custom code. Those nixies could become a segment display platform. That way MPF would know what to do with them. Probably depends on what you want to do. As usual everything is about tradeoffs.