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…
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 decisions were about the playfield, the mechanisms, cabinet and computers.