Serpent Lanes

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 wanted a good solution, one that just requires a hole, and nothing precise.

So some 3d design, a bit of printing, and some Electronics From China, a bit of code on a nice microcontroller, and all done. Would you believe months of work and a shopping bag full of prototypes? It was one of these, you can pick...

These are the boards I selected. The receiver is special and requires an infrared carrier at 38 kHz. The transmitter is special in that it does NOT provide 38 kHz. Read about the electronics in Infrared at 38 kHz.

I needed to make some 3d design to hold them. When printed, they hold the electronics quite well:

The wires come out of the top and run in a little trench.

This is the test rig, it's quite fancy.

The wires now terminate in a lovely JST connector that you can almost see.

I've got some balls for testing.

And a movie of the LEDs blinking.

A detailed template helps locate the holes.

A sophisticated drilling rig.

And no final picture because it's upside down in the Rotisserie at the moment.