Anubis, once worshipped by millions, now slumbers.
Guarantor of respect for the dead, only the brave, or foolish would risk his wrath.
Dare you tempt The Wrath of Anubis?
Construction Blog for the one-of-a-kind pinball machine Wrath of Anubis
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New in the tedious job category is working out the size of screws. Normally you can just get vernier calipers in there, but sometimes things have odd shapes and weird get-in-the-way-things and you have to be creative or guess. Enter the 3 RGB LED 17mm lamp board. What size head fits in here? Well 3mm and a bit... So I…
The Ankh occupies the centre of the playfield and displays the collected bonus. The Art Department is in charge of the playfield imagery, I'm designing the lighting for the inserts. The Ankh Lighting Tray holds the LED modules in the correct place for them to shine through holes in the playfield and into the poly-carbonate and artwork.
Adding Klipper to the CR-6 was not easy. One of the first things to go was the attached display and control panel. I thought this would be a hassle, but it was actually not a problem. MainsailOS gives lots of control, and creature comforts, as well as the printing quality improvements from Klipper. What do you get? The core Software…
As I was contemplating huge prints I started to look for quick wins to reduce printing times... History I bought a Creality CR-6 Max second hand and not printing reliably. It had all the usual problems you can read about for this model printer, enough that you may wonder why anybody wants one. Well the answer to that is the…
I spent almost half a year designing different playfield construction types. Why not just wood? Well the call of innovation I suppose, plus a distaste for woodwork, and a desire to create sturdy, precisely located playfield components. After significant agonising over the pros and cons I produced a list of methods: Option 4 was looking good The Featured Image shows…
I set about emulating #455 flasher bulbs with modern hardware, specifically RGB LEDs and microcontrollers. I did this in response to issues raised in this forum post https://www.aussiearcade.com/topic/105680-455-flasher-bulbs, and from curiosity to see if it could be done for a reasonable price without mass manufacturing. Criticisms of current LED flasher lamp offerings: Ideally, the digital-electronic version will overcome these problems.
I wish to replace my dependency on Adobe software. The subscriptions are expensive, the AI features are intrusive and crippled by terribly-implemented censorship (can’t process an image with an armpit), and they still crash/lockup. So I’m investigating Open Source alternatives, with a fall back to some acceptable but click-bait-riddled commercial products (cheap but Ok). A comparison of the “best” open…
So, drying filament with a nice automatic machine seems a better idea than struggling the hard way with ovens and such. Enter the [name supressed] from [brand supressed], a fine-looking device. Within a few days the helpful device decided to leave the heating element on all the time, even when powered off at the control panel. I suspect a FET…
So after testing the IR device in Serpent Lanes I found some instability due to temperature change. I decided to use a new sensing technique, and this gave me a chance to try a different design for the upper lanes. The columns are taller, more stylised, and feature colour-changing capitals (tops). Construction is a bit sturdier, and replacement far easier.
Capacitors So, even with a big beefy power transformer, and nice thick wires, you can never get enough current to a coil. Enter the Capacitor Caddy™. This fantastic device allows a bunch of reasonably priced Capacitors to be ganged up into a decent fast release energy store - just the thing for those pesky lethargic coils. The parts are 3D…
And it works... The onboard LED flashes a different colour for warn, tilt, and slam. Features Feature Achieved Self-levelling Yes Immune to harmonic motion Yes Single trigger per tilt action Yes Time delay between tilt activations Yes Rustproof Yes Provide warning Yes Replace Tilt-bob Yes Replace Lift-tilt Yes Replace Slam-tilt Yes Lift and Slam work in all directions Yes Adjustable…
I want to add a tilt feature. Not because it's needed, but because I like to practice my mojo with a limit. I've got a bunch of tilt mechanisms, but they all need refurbishing, and I've had enough of that for a while; so I says to myself... Why not build an electronic tilt mechanism? As usual, this was a…
Final(?) assembly of my Gottleib Testing Power Supply What I wanted was a power supply that can give me lots of coil power and lighting power for 5Volt LEDs. What I got was everything except the 5Volt (I've not done the testing yet). I've been delayed doing this for ages - I wanted some furniture feet, big rubber stopper things…
Configuring lights in Mission Pinball Framework is a bit of effort. You need a config block for each light, and there are lots and lots of them. Rather than type it all in, I wanted to take some existing config files and add a bunch of single lines to them, and then have a magical script turn that gibberish into…
Better is the Enemy of Done Words to live by. I've always hated napkin designs and quick sketches. They are ugly and confusing. There is no denying though, that they get the job done quick. The ugly schematic lead to a bit of ugly construction... So we have 240V switched with a circuit breaker, coil power switch, amp and volt…
To assist in development the aim is to have: I managed this previously but it needs reworking to accommodate Godot. 🔥 Achieving point 1: VM Linux MPF Godot 🔥 Achieving point 2: VM Copies Super easy - VirtualBox takes care of it all. 🔥 Achieving point 3: Same Godot and MPF projects on Windows and VMs VirtualBox provides a shared…
With the assistance of Mr Anthony van Winkle, I've managed to get a simple attract slide functioning in Godot, and extended it to a (working) rudimentary carousel: I'm back where I was a year ago, but with better options for the future! I also don't want to say that it took 15 hours to get here, but it took 15…
The Mission Pinball Framework is a complex creature I've written about many times. Recently there has been an upgrade; version 0.80 has a major change in how graphics, and sound are implemented. Previously there was mc, the inhouse media "thing" developed by the MPF people. It worked a bit like a spreadsheet program with the sheets being strung together in…
I needed some playfield supports, and because I wanted to mount things where I did, the 'normal' ones were not a good fit. I determined to make temporary ones, initially from wood to do the job. The problem with the wood design is that it consumes a lot of space, and is difficult to work around. I also discovered that…
This is why everything takes so long. If you read the exciting 5V to 3V3 post above, you will be aware that I'm using a CNC board designed to work with an old Arduino Uno, but with a nice modern ESP32 chippie. Now there are plenty of libraries to use the CNC, board, but I'm driving a pinball machine, and…
You know how a simple thing leads to an endless number of tasks...
I have a CNC controller board that drives stepper motors for various playfield tasks.
I designed a little circuit board holder to use while developing the playfield. it works well and is quite neat - gives easy access to both sides of the board, and screws on as well. Next version will support horizontal mounting as well. The circuit board is held in little slots in the 'arms', and the board pops out as…
Infrared detectors traditionally suffer from interference - false triggering, and failing to trigger. This has been a common problem in pinball machines - "bloody optos" being a catchphrase I've heard many times. To overcome the interference problem, I'm using an infrared receiver that only "listens" to infrared (IR) that has a carrier frequency of 38 kHz. In simple terms, if…
The lanes at the top of Wrath of Anubis are called Serpent Lanes. This is because they will have a snake (Big Hissa) on top of them. Normally, lanes like these have slots routed in the playfield, and microswitches with a springy wire coming through that the ball presses down to indicate its passage. I don't like routing slots. I…
Pat Hand is a Williams pinball machine I restored and took to Pinfest.
The control systems use by people building commercial machines has changed. Haggis(RIP) moved away from MPF according to Aron (Pinside), using Unity for their last machine before entering liquidation. Homepin have released an open source approach using RetroPinUpgrade. Mission Pinball Framework has moved to Godot
My view is that you have not designed a thing until it has been tested, and it works.
Through my long and perilous journey to get MPF into a fit state to run a pinball machine, I learnt a few things. Many of them specific to the time and versions I used, but in general the types of things to look out for are same. And please note, you can just as easily be lucky and have everything work first time – that’s what the developers aim for, and it does happen.
The first thing you hear when you switch it on…
The Backbox is the first thing you see…
We needed a cabinet. Rescue 911 to the, um, rescue. So we needed a cabinet. Lots of research showed I could build one easily enough, except I didn’t want to build one. Building wooden things is something I can do, not something I enjoy. Repairing a set of French doors and frames was good demonstration of just how much I…
To build a pinball machine, you need parts…
“Everybody needs a Rotisserie!”
So we had lots of ideas for themes for the pinball machine. And we would start designing ,and collecting resources, untill another idea came along that was better than the last. The Frog One of the earliest game ideas. Rules can come from locations like: Some quick work on the computer gave concept art: Later designs were moderately improved: The…
The first decisions were about the playfield, the mechanisms, cabinet and computers.
To build a pinball machine, you need parts... Q) Where can I get cheap pinball parts in Australia? A) No. Even the most shoddy item with the word pinball in front of it secures a price similar to that for a three bedroom house in the heart of Sydney. I've heard many reasons for this, including the Australia Tax (shipping…
There have to be as many philosophies on designing pinball machines, as there are pinball machine designs.