We got a 24V 15A power supply to run the solenoids. The original Gottlieb machine ran on 20 volts AC and there was no chance we were sticking with that (plus I threw out all the old circuitry remember?) So I had to try and make this work with DC voltage. All in all, there were six custom circuit boards in the pinball machine. There was also a breakout board for the 32 switches on the playfield, just because I wanted to connect everything with female-female jumper wires just in case we needed to change things. There was also a custom Arduino controller driving the NeoPixels and so I decided to keep things clean and let it just run color patterns and not worry about anything else (I'd later add the relay functionality to this that I'll talk about shortly). At the suggestion of Maximo Balestrini ( VIDEOGAMO), I used two Darlington Arrays (ULN2003) and built another board to drive the LEDs. The white LEDs couldn't be driven directly by the Teensy, so I had to build another network of transistors to drive them. I had to reinforce all of those connections later with thicker gauge wire. I would later learn that the copper traces on the coils were much too thin, and the copper started burning apart. This helped to isolate the voltage for the bumpers and minimize false positives. I decided to use one Teensy 3.2 to control the bumpers, and another Teensy 3.6 to control all of the other switches on the playfield, as well as the white LEDs inside of the bumpers and lamps. I used an Othermill machine to etch a copper board for the MOSFETs and another board for the Teensy microcontroller. I started with a MOSFET board for the coils. It was clear that I'd need to make some custom circuitry for all of the different components on the machine. We stripped all of the components from the playfield and Joe painted a Death By Audio theme. I contacted Joe Jurewicz, an old friend from Death By Audio who actually helped build the warehouse space with Oliver back in the early '00s. The art on Mademoiselle was beautiful, but we had our own theme. The first thing that we wanted to do was paint the playfield. We kept the switches and coils on the playfield, but everything else got trashed. I wanted to control everything with microcontrollers and newer technology anyway. It was enticing to try to use the old rotary scoreboard, but in the end we decided a complete overhaul would be best. They were rusty, corroded, and most of the wires had already been cut by Eric.so we got rid of them. No ICs, no computers, just magnets and coils and switches.Ībout 90% of the interior of the machine was made up of these relays. Every time the ball hit a switch, it closed a mechanical relay and caused a solenoid (coil) on the bumper to fire. In 1959, pinball machines were entirely electro-mechanical. I reached out to my friend Steve Litt, a fellow electrical engineer, NYU professor, and head of Crudlabs, to help inspect the cabinet. For all intents and purposes, it was trash- but it was perfect for what we wanted. The playfield was chipped and peeling in some parts and the wires had all been cut. It wasn't in great shape - two of the legs were falling off and the headboard glass was cracked. I had been interested in hearing about the process, but never got a chance to meet up to see the actual machine. In 2016, he was moving out of his studio and couldn't bring the machine with him, so I offered to buy it from him. My friend Eric Barry Drasin had acquired an old 1959 Gottlieb Mademoiselle machine and was hacking it so it worked with Max/MSP. This was all just a pipe dream until September 2016. I also knew it would need a sound system capable of competing with a Marshall half stack. All in all, their performances were a sensory overload of sound and light and I thought "this would be the perfect theme for a pinball machine."īefore the project even started, I knew the pinball machine would have strobe lights, lasers, and a fog machine. In 2009, APTBS was branded "the loudest band in New York" and their shows consisted of a bunch of projectors pointed at the audience, lasers covering the walls, fog machines that obscured most of the stage, and an encore that usually involved Oliver smashing his guitar in front of a gigantic strobe light. Around this time, Death By Audio was closing and my roommate Oliver's band, A Place To Bury Strangers, were gearing up to play the final show. There are also a lot of rock-and-roll themed pinball machines like Kiss, Metallica, and AC/DC. It's a great collection of pinball machines, dating back to the 1950's. In 2014 I took a trip to the Silverball Pinball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ.
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