I recently revisited the prototype I made for the Arduino and Rockwell 10941/10939 chipset project. Ever since I made that prototype I wanted to design a proper PCB for it. I finally came around doing just that.

At the end of 2021 they got picked up to be on their way to the Dutch Pinball Museum: three devices which are the first iteration of project Test-Case. I’ve worked on this project for about a year, together with my father.

A few months ago I designed and assembled my first PCB featuring multiple SMD components. It essentially is a scaled down pinball machine controller board featuring eight high power outputs, eight LED outputs, and a four by four input matrix. And all of that crammed onto a 10 by 10 centimeter PCB.

I am working on a project for which I have to rewire a Williams EM Stardust pinball machine. To make sure I will be able to rewire it correctly, I wanted to redraw the original schematics diagram. To do that, I ended up creating and releasing my own symbols library for QElectroTech with symbols for drawing Williams EM schematics diagrams.

The first two posts introduced this project and the things we tried to make the first prototype machines work. We eventually ended up using an Arduino Mega and some supporting electronics to control our first prototype machines. We are currently working on a more powerful and flexible electronics system for controlling pinball machines, and maybe even other devices.