Hey all,

I wanted to share the new servo mod I made to my Zizzle POTC machine.

For this mod I installed a servo above the Skull Ramp near the sub-ramp where the ball can fall through the hole (behind the treasure chest) if it is not going fast enough to make it all the way over the edge of the ramp and into the pop bumpers.

I swapped the wires for the rollover lane (Skeleton Pirate Battle) switches and the switch located behind the treasure chest. Now the difficult-to-access rollover lanes score bonus points and the target behind the chest must be activated three times to achieve the Skeleton Pirate Battle goal.

When the servo arm is activated it blocks the second half of the Skull ramp and diverts the ball down the sub-ramp to the new Skeleton Pirate Battle switch. The servo arm is activated by hitting the main Treasure Chest target. When this target is hit, the servo arm blocks the ramp for 10 seconds before returning to its upright position.

This makes achieving the Skeleton Pirate Battle goal much easier and adds an extra challenge to the game, since access to the goal is timed and requires the player to hit both a target and a ramp. This target can also be achieved by shooting the ball directly behind the treasure chest into the loop, but as most players know this can be very difficult.

I provided some pictures and have (finally!) made a YouTube video of all of the mods (including the Arduino mods from a month ago) done to this machine.

The clip is available at:

Hope you enjoy!

-Brian

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FYI,

If the embedded YouTube link above didn't work, the URL is:

No the ball is not coppered but that is a really interesting idea! Come to think of it I have access to a gold plating machine but it never occurred to me to try plating a ball. I'd imagine the plating would wear off eventually after enough play. I might give it a try on a spare ball though.

I have black pinballs with metallic-colored pupils and vein patterns somehow plated on the surface so they look like eyeballs. Looks really cool, I use them in my PinBot since one of the main objectives is to shoot the balls into his eye sockets to give him sight. Three years and at least 500 games later the balls still look good as new.

All in all, with the servo diverter mod included, somewhere in the $60 range if you get the stuff cheap on Ebay and are willing to wait for longer shipping. I found a non-working Zizzle in crap-o condition on Ebay for around $150 (that included shipping) that I keep on hand strictly for spare parts, and its already come in handy a few times.

Hey all,

For anyone interested I created a thread called “PinBot Mods” showing all of the similar mods I recently made to my Pin Bot machine.

-Brian