Lego NXT Pinball Machine

[markg]

I work at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, Canada. Together with a co-op student I've spent the last four weeks building up a full-size Lego Pinball Machine. It made it's public debut at a Science event this weekend at the University of Windsor. Over 100 people (mostly kids) tried out the machine and it worked pretty well the whole day. A few parts were knocked off during the day but they were easily repaired (it's Lego!).

It was a lot of fun building the machine - the programming was a bit tedious at times. It uses 6 NXTs, 9 touch sensors, 4 motors, 12 9V lamps and 10 light sensors. My guess at the number of parts is about 8000, but it's probably less than that.

The local news station did a story on the machine, you can read an article and view the story on their site http://www.cbc.ca/windsor.

I've got a few more details, photos, videos, the NXT-G files and some preliminary MLCad files on my website : http://sites.google.com/site/legonxtpinball. I'm updating and adding to the website this week - until now I've been too busy building to get much done there.

The best part of this build is that I got to do it all at work - and they paid for all the bricks! The whole experience was a lot of fun and the news coverage is pretty cool. The machine was also pictured in a local paper a few times and the article was also reprinted in a few other far-off papers here in Canada.

Here's a picture of the completed machine. It's not the best picture, but this thing is big and heavy so it's hard to move around for a photo.

[Big Cam]

Wow, that looks very good. I'd love to see a video of it in action once it is completely done and assembled. I'm very intrigued by your ball loading mechanism.

[markg]

  Big Cam said:

Wow, that looks very good. I'd love to see a video of it in action once it is completely done and assembled. I'm very intrigued by your ball loading mechanism.

The ball return took us a number of tries to get right. The first couple were tossing the ball across the table - not a good idea with a heavy steel ball :) This one uses two motors and works pretty well. The motor on the top of the machine needs to be mounted a little better.

I posted videos of the ball return and gameplay on my site :

http://sites.google.com/site/legonxtpinball/videos

cheers - mark

[Milan]

That thing is massive!!!

I like it!

[markg]

  Milan said:

That thing is massive!!!

I like it!

Yep, it's fairly large - 72 by 160 studs.

cheers - mark