I bought myself an Arduino and some relays and needed something to do with them and the Wizard wasn't getting played all that much so...
I took a gps receiver that came with Microsoft trips and streets and wired it into the Arduino, so now the Arduino would know what time it was. I then hooked up the Arduino to a bank of relays that for the most part just open and close switches - these relays I wired in parallel to some switches in the cabinet so the Arduino could make the pin reset, score 10,100 or 1000, think the ball was in the outhole. Lastly I put a relay inline with the main power so I could turn the game on and off.
With that all done I spent about 45 minutes to program the Arduino to make the pin act like a clock - ok maybe it took a week or two.
The end result was when I plugged the game the GPS would listen for a signal with the current time. When it got one it would power off and on the pin, add some credits, reset the machine to the start of a four player game and then start scoring points until the score almost read the current time. Then the outhole switch would close, it would add the final 1000 points to read the current time and the player 2 score would start adding up much the same way until it was 1000 points away from the current year. Player 3 would eventually read what time the game was scheduled to turn on at and player 4 was the month/day. After all that the game would be back on player one and the score would increment every minute by 10 or 410 on the hour. At 12:59 it would do a complete reset again.
I also put in a couple of buttons so you could program what time in the morning the machine would turn on and what time of day it would turn off.
In order to make this all happen, all I needed to do to the pin was to alligator clip some wires to the jones plugs. No permanent modifications required.
The next revision I will skip the GPS and just use a real time clock chip. Not as accurate - but no need to have a GPS module hanging out the basement window either! I'm also planning on making a clock out of a spare Duotron head I have no body for.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uUnR5iLF33M[/youtube]
http://www.instructables.com/id/Turn-a-1970s-pinball-machine-into-an-atomic-synch/
I took a gps receiver that came with Microsoft trips and streets and wired it into the Arduino, so now the Arduino would know what time it was. I then hooked up the Arduino to a bank of relays that for the most part just open and close switches - these relays I wired in parallel to some switches in the cabinet so the Arduino could make the pin reset, score 10,100 or 1000, think the ball was in the outhole. Lastly I put a relay inline with the main power so I could turn the game on and off.
With that all done I spent about 45 minutes to program the Arduino to make the pin act like a clock - ok maybe it took a week or two.
The end result was when I plugged the game the GPS would listen for a signal with the current time. When it got one it would power off and on the pin, add some credits, reset the machine to the start of a four player game and then start scoring points until the score almost read the current time. Then the outhole switch would close, it would add the final 1000 points to read the current time and the player 2 score would start adding up much the same way until it was 1000 points away from the current year. Player 3 would eventually read what time the game was scheduled to turn on at and player 4 was the month/day. After all that the game would be back on player one and the score would increment every minute by 10 or 410 on the hour. At 12:59 it would do a complete reset again.
I also put in a couple of buttons so you could program what time in the morning the machine would turn on and what time of day it would turn off.
In order to make this all happen, all I needed to do to the pin was to alligator clip some wires to the jones plugs. No permanent modifications required.
The next revision I will skip the GPS and just use a real time clock chip. Not as accurate - but no need to have a GPS module hanging out the basement window either! I'm also planning on making a clock out of a spare Duotron head I have no body for.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uUnR5iLF33M[/youtube]
http://www.instructables.com/id/Turn-a-1970s-pinball-machine-into-an-atomic-synch/