Raspbery Pi based Arcade Machine FTC Payment Proof of concept
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Nice work! that was pretty quick to be to this stage. :)
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AWESOME!
I pretty much wanted to do the same for a year or so, never got to it till about a week ago.
As hacking is kinda my thing, i bought a second hand network router for about $4 and started messing around with it.
Simply put, i started at the other half of your project.
I have a 1994 Corvette pinball machine in mint condition in my living room.
I hacked the router to be a very basic DHCP enbaled linux box with SSH management. I used the GPIO to enable the “WiFi” LED. This will trigger the relay.
A relay is definately the way to go as the original “coin taster” drops a coin on a switch. The switch has two nice big exposed soldering points on the two wires. So my plan was to use some non-destructive clip-on system from the other side of the relay.
Current status:
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Router rooted and configured
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FTC balance script untested (bash script using external API)
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WiFi LED output soldered to a long wire.
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Router nicely back in it’s casing.
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Pinball machine configured (I used the old Dutch currency Gulden. This results in the currency “F” on the screen, 1F, 2F, 10F, etc.)
Todo:
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Solder a small relay on a PCB connected to “coin taster” and hacked router.
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Test bash script.
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Find a way to display a “working/not-working” LED under the glass. (i have blinking startup LED i can manually trigger on the router as well)
My pinball payment conversion would be a lot less fancy but only cost me about $5
I love hacking around with hardware. Making it do wonderfull things it was never intended for :)
-alex
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Nice, look forward to your results.
Omce I sat down and wrote the code I was amazed at how simple it was. I think in total I’ve got about 40 or 50 lines of codes and a lot of that is just notes in the code to remind me what each bit does.
I’m assuming you are not going to wire the relay directly to the output, but have it driven by a transistor as I doubt a cct that was made to light up an LED will be able to drive a relay without damaging your router
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Code for stage one is now available on github
https://github.com/tmuir12/FTC_Arcade_Pay/tree/master
It will be a week or two before I have completed stage 2
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This is great work :) I have way to much on right now or I would be following your lead and building something up. I can see a FTC powered pinball machine coming on our meetups in the near future ;)
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I love all this. Who was the guy paying his children’s pocket money in FTC? would be a great way to regulate video game use haha.
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Its pay day on Tuesday so will order the parts then.
I can see integrating the screen will be my biggest challenge, but there are a lot of great ‘howtos’ around on the web
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Another Raspberry PI, that can be dedicated to this project has been purchased along with the screen.
I’m guessing I will now have a 1 to 2 week wait for them to arrive from the USA before I can continue my build.
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I think Raspberry PI’s are made in the UK now (Although the original runs were made in china I believe)
EDIT: yep Wales - http://www.raspberrypi.org/tag/made-in-the-uk/ :)
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Yes Raspberry Pis have been made in the UK for some time now, but the display I wanted I had to buy from Adafruit and I needed another Pi so bought it from them and a few other parts to spread the cost of the postage.
Tracking says I should get everything mid next week.
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I think Raspberry PI’s are made in the UK now (Although the original runs were made in china I believe)
EDIT: yep Wales - http://www.raspberrypi.org/tag/made-in-the-uk/ :)
Yes they are, be very careful if you have one of the early ones that was made in china as they are nowhere near as reliable for some reason… I had loads of problems on one of my projects due to this and as soon as I switched it out for a UK built Pi everything started to work out again :-
This is also worth looking into http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28263659 depending on what interfaces you are after, a little less power consumption would be good for a couple of my devices as they run from batteries
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This is also worth looking into http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28263659 depending on what interfaces you are after, a little less power consumption would be good for a couple of my devices as they run from batteries
Thats just so typical.
Just a few hours before I ordered a new Pi, they released a new and improved model and I ordered the older model. >:(
Extra USB ports is definitely nice, makes it much easier to use wireless with a keyboard and mouse
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Yay! Got it working :)
I am going to use this at a job interview on Monday. It covers a lot of things they need me for:
http://balgehacked.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/10-cryptocurrency-pinball-mod/
All in all a $10 mod to the pinball machine.
@tmuir12, I am looking forward to your version. The LCD screen will be a must have i guess. If there is anything i can help you with, please drop me a line ;)
Happy hacking!
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Wow that’s great work well done. And what a great blog too. :)
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Cool!
I found it took about 1 minute 20 seconds for the credit to reach my Pi, so about the same time as yours.
Your solution is definitely cheaper than mine, well done!
I hope to have the screen and my new Pi some time next week, so by next weekend I might of made some more progress.
I have been thinking that being able to prepay for credits would also be useful ut I’m not sure whether this would be within my coding skill.
The idea they pay in advance and get a QR code that could be printed out, or displayed on a phone and using a Raspbery Pi camera in theory it should be able to scan it and then add the credits straight away, but that is just an idea at the moment, not completely sure how to implement it
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Wow that’s great work well done. And what a great blog too. :)
+1
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I receive my new Raspberry Pi and LCD screen today.
Have just finished installing Raspbian on it, and now I’m about to put the display together and then will probably spend the next couple of hours following this tutorial from Adafruit to get the display going
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Model B+ looks very good. Nice improvements indeed.
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Yes shame I didn’t know it was available and just ordered the regular model B.
I’ve got the display hooked up and everything on the Raspbery is going well, but I’ve hit a snag as teh feathercoin wallet app won’t read QR codes off my screen whilst my other QR reader app does
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Display i installed and working.
Have some basic code to display the QR code and a simple off line message when it can’t reach the API.
Tomorrow night I will attempt to put all the coding together and by using my other QR scanner on my phone and pasting in the address into my wallet I can get around the issue of the scanner not working in my FTC wallet…
Will hopefully get some photos and maybe a video up tomorrow.
