Custom Pinball Machine

As the term project for my Mechatronic Systems course at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, my interdisciplinary team of mechanical, electrical, and software engineers collaborated to design a scratch-built, custom pinball machine.

For this machine, I led the electrical design. This system included selecting electromechanical actuators to control the ball’s movement, sensors to detect the ball’s presence for score calculation, and components to interface with the player to accept input and display game information. The system was designed around a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and CircuitPython code. The accompanying circuitry included analog to digital conversion, SPI and I2C bus communication and I/O expansion, and power electronics to control actuators, light, and sound. All circuitry was designed in KiCAD and then assembled by hand onto a perfboard.

Further, for this project, I lead the mechanical, electrical, and software integration. This included ensuring each engineering discipline on the team was documenting and sharing the necessary information, assisting with fabrication and assembly, and preparing for design reviews throughout the project.

A copy of the system’s final schematic can be found here.