Great Success!
Tonight I hit an important milestone in my pinball project: things are working! Since my last post I’ve learned that doing anything interesting with the parallel port is practically impossible on a Mac, and so I decided to solve that problem by employing an Arduino I/O board.
Sidebar: If you have ever, ever considered doing anything with a microcontroller, allow me to heartily recommend the Arduino. The Wiring language is as easy as can be, and there are a lot of great tutorials to show you how to do things. I’ve never done anything with PICs or microcontrollers before, and already I’ve been able to control a logic board and hack together code to read PS/2 data. That says something, I think, about the strength of this product. Plus it’s freakin’ cheap: $35 for a USB model!
Anyway, my plan is to use the board as the game’s I/O controller, controlling the lamp/solenoid driver board as well as interpreting switch events. Here is the state of the project:
It’s not pretty, per se, but it works! Presently it’s taking commands from the Mac over a USB/serial interface to the Arduino and executing those commands to turn on and off lamps (LEDs) connected to the driver board. I still have a very, very long way to go, but it’s exciting to see the components working together.