A projects to custom build a full size Pinball machine that uses a Raspberry Pi as the main computer for sensor controls and updating the display.
Spending many years down the local arcades and before the days or Arcade quality games consoles I had always wanted to have a arcade machine and a pinball machine at home, inevitably I never did. The closest I got was using Mame the arcade emulator on my PC which is nearly as good as standing at a Arcade cabinet playing a game but not the same. Incidental Mame is available on the Raspberry Pi but that's for another article.
Mark Baldridge has wanted to build a Pinball machine from scratch for many years and unlike me he eventually decided to turn is dream into reality. He has started building a pinball machine with the theme of Rhett & Link, an Internet comedy duo, but instead of converting an existing table he is designing the whole cabinet, table layout, graphics and electronic display himself.
At the heart of the machine is a Raspberry Pi which keeps track of the sensors that are being hit to update the score, it also controls the bumpers and targets making them pop up and down as required during the game and then send the text and graphics to the display all controlled by Mark's Python library.
The project is in progress so the table is not complete yet but you can follow the progress of this interesting project at mark's blog.