This Raspberry Pi Mini Pinball Machine Is The Coolest Time Killer Since Minesweeper
The history of pinball has a long and storied past. The first commercially successful pinball machine was introduced in 1931 by Gottlieb and it didn't even have the now-ubiquitous flippers. In fact, it didn't have bumpers, rebounds, multi-ball, or just about anything we associate with pinball today. If you were to see the game today, called Baffle Ball, you'd probably equate it to something similar to the popular Japanese game, Pachinko. However, recently someone decided to minify and modernize the pinball machine using a Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
Using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a basis and a fascination with all things arcade, Chris Dalke put into motion a plan to bring the classic arcade home, just in a smaller form. Using interlocking laser cut plywood he was able to create a minimalistic case that is easy to open, an important trait when dealing with anything you want to make small like this. However Chris didn't just want this to be tiny, he wanted it to feel real.
While the playing field of the pinball machine is a 7-inch HDMI screen, Chris used arcade style push buttons with clicky feedback. And to add to that "real" feel he was going for he even added in a solenoid to give the user a nice bump, as though they were hitting real flippers. To add to the arcade-feel of the project, he also utilized an Adafruit LED Matrix panel, which provides scoreboard and feedback that does make it seem like the display panel on a full size arcade cabinet, except tiny.
It's a fun little project, that could result in as much fun time-wasting as minesweeper, or Windows 2000 pinball which no one played on work time... ever, because that would be irresponsible (shhh!). There have been lots of minification projects lately, and we really think they're neat—you should check them out!
Photo credits: Chris Dalke
