131 replies to this topic

[pinballwitch]

Heya,

 

I've honestly been resistant to virtual pinball for ages because of the mechanical beauty and real physics of the steel balls flying around, but having finally come to accept that I'm NOT going to spend £15K on an Addams Family machine that I have NO room for, I'm building a tiny little model pinball machine instead.

 

I've done some learning about visual pinball on a thinkpad and a borrowed tv, I got this table from this forum for which I'm very grateful!

 

I've cut up some wood after doing trigonometry to get the 10 degree angle on my small boards (thanks high school you were not useless after all)

 

de-cased a tv I got for this purpose, a cute little 40" samsung

 

Am a bit worried about whether i need this bit of the tv which has the power buttons and IR receiver on it, and I have no idea how to get it unstuck from the front of the telly, or or if the presumably capacitive buttons will work without the front plastics, I've not quite worked out how to get the tv to turn on of its own accord despite believing it to have CEC or something?

 

And that gets me to here:

 

Now I have dimensions for the screen I can cut the front and back panel and try the lock rabbit routing business to get nice corners, wish me luck?

 

It's going to pretty tight in that box i think, there's not a lot of vertical room to play in.

 

 

[pinballwitch]

lets do an update, why not?!

 

Cut up the front and back, getting the 8 degree angle on the front to match the side bevel, I thought i was aiming for 10 but here we are.

 

lets test fit the telly even though we're going to shrink the box size by  18mm because of the 45 degree joins we plan to do:

 

 

even though this is a bijou build, it's still going to be a chonk, pinball machines are BIG huh?!

 

Next fun, lets do some corner joints; oh wait, the bit is too big for my router, yay!

 

those two lugs are used to hold on a dust collector vacuum attachment boot. I would need to relieve a little bit of the fence to clear the bit and remove a touch of metal from the flat sides of the opening as well as the lugs to get the bit to sink in.

 

I have all the tools to modify this router and to be honest probably will, but I'm just pausing to consider my options. I don't really have space for a router table, since I don't really have space for a pinball, hahaha

Edited by pinballwitch, 12 May 2024 - 12:44 PM.

[pinballwitch]

a christmas tree drill bit, a dremel, and a bunch of filing with a half round file and it fits now. it's 1200W so I wonder if it'll have the power to plunge this.

 

[pinballwitch]

This 'router table' is nowhere near big enough to build pinball machines, I had to modify IT in the same vein as the router to get the bit installed.

 

With a terrifying gnashing sound like a million bees on fire, and a cut that looks like there was too much heat around we get joins that sort of might be good enough.

 

Needs further routing to set in a slot around the bottom edge to fit the floor in before glue up.

 

I have not yet checked to see if the telly still fits in it

[pinballwitch]

well, that's the *basics* of the box built.

 

I need to get some straps for glue up.

 

the really important bit though....

 

YAAAASSSSSS!

 

Do you HAVE to use the vesa mount, or can you suspend the tvs from the corners I wonder. I'm thinking about clearance under it mainly. I dunno what the flex modes are on the case and how much bend it takes to shatter the screen :/

[pinballwitch]

Glue up, dry fitting is fine till you get the glue in and it turns out to be a lubricant and all the parts slip in a way they didn't during dry fit. It's a good enough job for my needs and when the corner braces go in and whatnot it'll only get stronger.

 

Some blocks to figure out board position before building a pivot:

 

I'm going for the monitor just a bit under the glass to maximise space underneath for 'stuff'

tomorrow I'll stick some paper together and work out where to drill for the vesa mounts.

 

I'm going to have to start thinking about a computer to go in this thing soon!

[pinballwitch]

Ordered an i7 16GB rtx3050 and hope that's going to be 'enough'. Then we have to see if it'll fit in! I don't know what kind of board it's coming on, atx micro or mini but here's hoping it's smol

[pinballwitch]

I wonder if this will work

 

[pinballwitch]

started working on a back box.

 

can't figure out these lock mitre bits, they just fight me and fight me and in this case exploded my plywood, I'll just sand and fill before painting, i don't have enough care left to give

 

need to figure out how the internals go in there now.

[pinballwitch]

gosh, it's not easy this stuff, is it?!

 

 

I need to get some of these screens actually mounted, and i guess i need to think about LEGS, heh.

[pinballwitch]

Spent a happy afternoon with an angle grinder making some tabs from U channel for the backbox monitor.

 

 

Then whacked some battens in to the backbox and screwed the thing in.

 

I will have to drill a few holes for PC venting, cables, and play buttons, but after that I should be able to start powering this thing up and getting the software setup on the screens!

[pinballwitch]

Punched some holes in the case for stuff, measuring very carefully from the plans.

 

Then to the horror in the PIT of my stomach I found that the telly wants to be in the same place as the buttons

 

Since we're a miniature build, there isn't enough space to move the telly back that far (I know everything said plan for this, but I'm NEW ok and 3d space is baffling)
so I've raised the playfield to clear the buttons and will end up with the top glass flush on the screen which will just have to do.

 

I cut the hole in the bottom of the back box for wires and what not.

 

Sadly i don't have indoor space for woodworking and it's been too wet, so I can't make the top deck for the back of the box, or the face place for the backbox to hold the speaker grills and score screen.

 

Getting perilously close to doing some integration testing and seeing if the machine will PLAY though!

[pinballwitch]

I need to go through the setup docs *carefully* I got this far
 

 

but you can see there's info printing vertically up the right edge of the playfield, which should be somewhere else? not sure which screen that's supposed to go on.

 

I have not set up any of the inputs for flippers or the ball plunger yet so it's not playable.

 

Nice to see things lit up a bit though.

[pinballwitch]

stuff's been going on. I made the front panel with a recess for the DMD screen, this needs something doing on the back to attach the screen and support the driver board, I'll most likely design and 3d poop a bracket

 
I taped up the electronics to protect them whilst I relieved the case of the tv to get past the flipper buttons.


It's a bit mangled, but the main thing is that the screen fits in great now with space for the top glass


A screw fell out of one of the boards on the back of the telly and I lazily tried to avoid removing the support board from the tv and drilled through to get access. Of course I ruined a wire bundle!


So I fixed it


Of course when I next turned the rig on I was greeted with this:

and i went to bed VERY sad

This morning though I cracked it back open and gave this connector a firm rub, I'd obviously upset it when removing the safety tape I used when grinding near it


And now it looks like this:


Yay

I've ordered some perspex for the back glass cover and a couple of speaker grills for the dmd panel.

It's so much fun playing this thing, I can't wait till I have top glass and a lockdown bar so it's more comfortable to play.

[pinballwitch]

bonus post, got my vents in just before the rain got too much

[pinballwitch]

Oops, it's been a busy month, you REALLY can't build these things in a weekend

 

I designed, printed, and then gently milled this bracket to hold the dmd screen in

 

 

which means I can play addams family properly kind of, except with no lockdown bar the hand feel is horrible

 

 

I've since had to take it completely to bits to add:

Cooling fans in

 

Cooling fans out

 

And I recessed some front panel switches so they don't get bumped by accident, start, add coin and exit buttons.

 

 

I can carry on working on the back box, but this is not going back together again till it has at LEAST leg reinforcement and legs. Sourcing the right size wood to do the triangles in the box corners is evading me a bit.

Thanks for reading my blog

[rickh]

I wonder if this will work

 

An encoder ball shooter.  I made one last year, but the encoder was dentented and made this whining sound when I released the shooter. 

[pinballwitch]

 

I wonder if this will work

 

An encoder ball shooter.  I made one last year, but the encoder was dentented and made this whining sound when I released the shooter. 

 

Yeh, seems to work great. It needs a fairly fine balance on the calibration though.

Everything I've built so far seems to work fine with virtual pinball X but so far i've got very little working in other emulators, ooops.

[pinballwitch]

Wooooowwwwwww it's been a *minute* huh?

 

I have been SO SO scared about drilling the leg bolt holes. I have so much time in this build now that the idea of mucking it up was paralysing. So I went off and worked on some other projects.

 

I got back to the pinball today.

 

Over the months I've been trying to come up with a jig to drill from the outside in but I couldn't manage to get anything made with the accuracy needed so I ended up going a bit mental.

 

I 3d printed corner wedges with the bolt holes open.

Using my lathe I turned up a brass insert to use a drill guide bushing which will make (barely any) sense in a moment:

 

Because my box is tiny, the legs need to be mounted RIGHT at the bottom of the box so there's no space to get a drill chuck in to drill from inside out, so i used this wiggly extension to drive a hex drill. The largest i could find was 6.5mm so this acted as a pilot:

 

It seemed to work pretty well anyway:

 

I then chased the pilot hole with increasingly large drills from outside in till we got here:

 

bolts up nice:

 

It's cold and the days are short so I only got one done, but tomorrow I'll get the other 3 in and this thing might be able to stand on its own 4 feet.

 

After than, it's on to priming the wood before it gets wet.

[digitalarts]

Good Job !