This week I finished up the CAD designs for the entire machine, and while there are a couple of minor parts that I will still need to work on like the LCD mounting bracket and the hole for the outlet plug I have elected to postpone these as they are parts I can work on later and aren’t mission-critical to get the machine working. Additionally, I started manufacturing some of the parts for the pinball machine, printing one of the launching mechanism brackets, and starting to print the gears for the spinning pillars. At the time of writing this, the gears are going to take about 32 hours to print all five of them so hopefully, they don’t fail mid-print.

In addition to getting started with the prints, I have also started to try and figure out the Arduino code. Much like the intern before me, I intend to be using an Arduino Mega to control it due to the high number of controller pins. Should I run into bandwidth issues on the Mega when it comes to scoring I will switch over to an Arduino Due as it has the same pinout but has a much higher processing speed so the code should need very little to no modification to run properly if it needs ported. As I have mentioned before coding is not my strong suit so even though this is probably fairly simple code to someone fluent in Arduino this is probably going to be the most difficult part of the project for me.