After abandoning an attempt to build an electromechanical pinball table, maker Chris Dalke set about creating a desktop one with a 7-inch HDMI touchscreen instead. “I wanted to retain the feeling of a physical arcade game with intense sound, vibration, and colours, as well as the tactile response of the inputs,” he says.
Powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, his screen-based version of pinball is coded in C++ and OpenGL, using the open-source software development library raylib. An Arduino is used for the button inputs and LED matrix scoreboard. The enclosure is laser-cut from maple wood.
If your carpentry and mechanical skills are up to it, you could have a go at building a full-size physical pinball table, like Frogger1108’s beautifully finished Arduino-controlled project.
