Arduino Pinball Machine That Plays Itself

Very nice, I love pinballs. There's room for improvement on the ball detection and flippers movement, probably requiring a faster processor and complex code; I mean having really good control of the flippers (and ball detection accuracy) so that a flipper can be used to stop and direct the ball by firing it before the ball enters in its area then using the flipper returning to place to damp the ball speed, then before the ball falls into the hole, wait the right amount of time before firing again the flipper to give the ball the desired trajectory. This is not too hard to learn for a human but probably quite a challenge both for hardware and software.

> in animum apparatus iacet victoria

My Latin is pretty bad. Victory lies in the spirit of the machine, maybe? Or perhaps the spirit of victory lies in the machine?

It sounds like the flippers just fire when the camera identifies that a ball is somewhere in a zone that will cause the ball to be hit. I'm curious about doing more than that. I wonder how accurately such a system could aim for a particular target.

Seems like the perfect problem to apply reinforcement learning to. Just let it play and learn at the same time.

I think they could even skip the explicit implementation of ball position/velocity tracking.

As one of the good pinball players in the world, I think my ranking is safe for now.

They built a drunk pinballer flailing simulator...

https://aussieazuredevs.github.io/blog/pinball/genesis Is another group's attempt at using machine learning to play existing real games.

This would be a good "attract mode" feature to have on a commercial pinball machine in a bar, etc.

Heh, reminds me of the "Phantom Flip" on the old Monster Bash table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bash_(pinball)

Very cool! My daughter is getting interested in robotics, and we recently got an Arduino starter set. This won't be our next project, but it will get us building more!

Few. Why would I want to play pinball myself.

Why did they build the entire pinball machine themselves? The portion that "plays itself" is a camera attached to some very basic computer vision techniques that boil down to:

When ball detected in flipper area, flip.

You could attach this to any commercial machine by connecting a relay where the flipper buttons would be.