Car RamRod
Bringing Pinball Into the Future!
Brian Arment, Ryan Hunter, Aaron Shoaf
Project Refresher
• 1967 Williams Touchdown
• Electromechanical
• Changing to solid state
• Game play similar to original
Outline
• Micro-Controller and Board
• Driver/Step-up Board
• Playfield Interaction
• A/V Controller
• Display
• Audio
Overview
User Input
Driver Board
Micro-controller
25 Vac
Playfield
6 Vac
(Sensors, Lights
and
Solenoids)
A/V
Controller
Power
Supply
Display
5 VDC
User Input
•
Two Flipper Buttons
•
Start
Coin or Manual
Operation for Credits
•
RF
LF
Transistor enabled with
signal from MCU
(so that flippers can’t
be used when not in play)
MCT62 Optoisolator
feeds into a latch
(HC373, CPLD enabled)
to hold value until the
MCU reads its value.
CR
SB
MCT62
HC373
8 line bus to MCU
Micro-Controller
• MC68HC11E0
• Reads from latches (74373) that latch
the value of the sensors from the
playfield.
• Writes to latches to control the audio
and visual output of the machine.
• Writes to latches to control the
solenoids, lamps, and flippers on the
playfield by enabling MOSFET gates.
•Data lines and high order address bits
are buffered with 74245
Micro-Controller
Micro-Controller
EPROM & Software
• AT29C256 Flash
• Basically a MCU controlled state machine.
• Will implement a polling scheme to run.
• Runs a demo program while waiting for credits and
start.
• During game play polls the latches to see if a sensor has
been hit and updates the the score, lights and audio
accordingly.
• Once number of balls and credits run out reverts back to
idle mode.
Simple Software States
•Idle mode waits for coin insertion
and depression of the start button.
Init
Idle
Play
•Also pushes into demo mode after
a certain amount of time in idle.
Demo
•Upon entering play
mode, flippers, pop
bumpers, kickers, and all
sensory inputs are
enabled.
Driver Board
•Provides Necessary current and voltage for devices like:
•Solenoids (flippers, pop-bumpers, kickers)
•Lamps (in playfield and lightbox)
•Nearly everything on the playboard uses it
•It is controlled directly by the MPU via logic level voltages
Driver Board
• Needs to step up from 5V DC to 6 or 24v rectified AC
• Optoisolators to separate the logic from the higher
voltages. MCT62
• Using power MOSFET’s to control pop-bumpers,
flippers and kickout solenoids each need a lot of current.
IRF540 25A for flippers, IRF840 8A for all others
• Lights need less current so can use smaller transistors.
ZVN210 400mA
Driver Board
Logic-level input from MPU
6/24V AC
and 5VDC
for
soleniod
driving
Pull down resistors and optoisolators
Smaller FET’s (400 mA) for the lamps
Larger FETS (3-8 amps) for the coils
To Solenoids
To Lamps
Driver Board
Driver Board
• Current status and operation
• Fully functional in solenoid driving
• Lamps have been tested and are currently
being wired
• Active switching board used to test
external interface via custom 38 conductor
cable
Playfield
• Replaced the rubber in order to make
the ball bounce better.
• 30 individually controlled lamp circuits
(~100 individual lamps).
• 8 coil circuits.
• Both controlled by the driver board.
•All rubber and lamps replaced
Demo
QuickTime™ and a
Motion JPEG OpenDML decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
A/V Controls
Score Display
Visual
Current score/state latched
from the MPU
CPLD
Matrix or 7-segment
LED displays coding
Points Display
LED Bar Graph
Audio
A certain sequence of bits is written
to a 555 timer chip from the MPU when a
specific event occurs in the game.
VR3 – VS1003B
Plays a sound bite for
each bit pattern
Speaker System
Audio
• USB Jump Driver file storage
• Virtual Reality Sound Labs FM transmitter
for file select, play, and D/A converter
(VS1003B decoder - MP3, WAV, MIDI)
• Reverse engineer to find line level audio
and play to stereo jack for speakers.
Audio
Demo
QuickTime™ and a
Motion JPEG OpenDML decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Schedule
Milestones
1. Milestone 1
•
Driver board functionality
•
Playfield operation
•
Hopefully MCU performing at least NOP’s
2. Milestone 2
•
Some system integration (boards correctly
interacting with each other to some extent)
•
Maybe run a demo program with lights.
Risks and Contingency Plan
• A/V controller:
• Implement set of beeps and bells for audio and
toned down preprogrammed display art.
•Cosmetic restoration
• User Options
• 3 or 5 ball play
• #coins / credit
• Free play
• Multi-ball
Questions?
Ask them meow!