Question for Ben: Bill Paxton Pinball. I/O Board

[beazleybub]

Hi Ben,

I'm gearing up to build a pirates themed pinball machine and am not sure what chips you used for your input board.

I see the MM74HC595N shift registers you used for the light and solenoid control but did not see what you used for your input sensors. Can I use 74HC165 8Bit Counter Shift Registers?

http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/NXP ... q4fYXEg%3d

Thanks for the inspiration.

[gamemasterAS]

Might have better luck emailing him.

[beazleybub]

Thanks for your reply gamemasterAS.

I sent Ben a PM as well. I edited my post here with more details but did not want to badger Ben.
I am sure he is busy and had said something like he would not be able to help others creating their own or something like that but I hope he will at least point out what hardware he used.

Thanks

[beazleybub]

Ben sent me a pm. He was very helpful.

Thanks Ben

[WhatULive4]

I remember reading in one of his posts or videos that he might consider selling DIY kits with all the basic components. I'm not sure if this will ever happen though.

[Sparkfist]

Bill Paxton Pinball is, compared to other pinball machines, simple.... Hardware-wise. Bulk of the processing is one by the Propeller microcontroller. The code looked simple enough to pick up after playing with it for some time.

I did ask Ben about the code he wrote and he would have no problem sharing it, and in fact at the MGC was tweaking it to get better performance out of the pinball machine. If I remember right, he said the memory of the Propeller was 32k, and at the after hours party he leaned it down I think 2k or 3k worth of memory. So the set up Ben made really is pretty simple (in design) and can be toned to how you want it to work.

-Sparkfist