Another week of working on the Pinball machine! Heres some (mostly visual) updates. Enjoy! Nothing really changed here recently but since so far I didn’t really show this, here some pictures of the various solenoids that are driving the playing field action. (Including a rather creative solution for a missing pop bumper switch plastic) Here … Read more
In the previous posts in this series we dug into some data analysis on Magic the Gathering cards and tried to model the mana cost of cards in order to answer questions like “how much does ‘flying’ cost?”. We found a linear model that could explain the costs to some degree, however it struggled to … Read more
The display module started out as a pretty messy wire contraption with individual transistors. Boy, fixing short circuits with these things was no fun I tell you. At some point then I discovered TLC5940, groked the basics of KiCad, spent a bit of money and out came my first real PCB: Actually a bit proud … Read more
Since pretty much the beginning of the Pinball project it was clear there is gonna be a Death Star featuring a critical weakness in the thermal exhaust as easy to hit as a womp rat. The overall idea would be that there is some kind of ramp and if you manage to shoot the ball … Read more
In the previous post on this topic, we raised the question on how much particular abilities such as “flying” cost in the widely known trading card game Magic the Gathering. We found luckily there is a nice, usable free database out there that should be helpful to answer this and while trying to take a … Read more
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game I happen to like. It also so happens that there is a database of cards available online. Additionally I (like many programmers) kind-of got into Machine Learning recently. Lets see if we can combine these ingredients to come up with something interesting, shall we? Have you ever … Read more
Lots has happened in the last time, among other things, I got a new Job and moved to Berlin. Unfortunately I can not house my pinball project here, so it will stay at my fathers place and I’ll hope we will manage to continue it from time to time. There was some progress on the … Read more
So I had this problem with my SPI communication: When using a “long” cable (not longer than 2m), SPI communication (between raspberry pi and switches board), would drop bits. And I’m not talking a bit flip here or there, I’m talking about a bit getting lost in the sense that all following bits where received … Read more
First a quick update: Yes I’m (kinda) still using this site to blog, obviously, my beloved adventure game engine hasn’t gotten much of the love it deserves in the past time, though. The reason for this is twofold: First, I finally made my PhD (yes, you may call me doctor now) the other one is, … Read more
A topic thats using up my (rare) private coding time lately is the topic of how to define where an actor is allowed to walk and how it will find its way there. I found this question quite fun to work on, as it poses an interesting mix of theoretical (geometry) and practical (coding) considerations. … Read more