With no space for a full sized pinball machine I am “forced” to take a 1980 Bally Centaur Pinball Machine and convert it into a working and playable coffee table!
Others have put playfields into coffee tables, and some have gone so far as to light them up, but this project goes beyond that! Once complete, I will have created an interactive coffee table that tilts up and plays just like the original! However, it will rest no higher than 18 inches from the ground when not being played.
In my latest update I solved one of the major design challenges. I removed the backbox that houses the score displays and circuit boards and made progress as follows:
- Implemented a display decoder chip using the open-source TinyFPGA BX board (Hackaday project HERE).
Coding my own SPI core in Verilog.
- Addressing the display decoder logic:
The display decoder logic leverages combinational logic to simultaneously sample one digit which is instantaneously shown to the user. The score values are stored in RAM, created in the FPGA, and an interrupt output is toggled to notify the Teensy 4.1 that a score has been updated from a previous value.
The Teensy will then display the score on a couple of test OLEDs using the font of the original game. The actual size, locations and number of displays are to be determined, but getting it to score out reliably was a big challenge as this is my first FPGA project.
Video demo here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CHEFbR0nTjQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Next I will making a custom circuit board before transitioning over to CAD, woodworking, and restoration :)
More info: buildxyz.xyz
