
Arduino Pinball Machine That Plays Itself - bwidlar
https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Pinball-Machine-That-Plays-Itself/
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squarefoot
Very nice, I love pinballs. There's room for improvement on the ball detection
and flippers movement, probably requiring a faster processor and complex code;
I mean having really good control of the flippers (and ball detection
accuracy) so that a flipper can be used to stop and direct the ball by firing
it before the ball enters in its area then using the flipper returning to
place to damp the ball speed, then before the ball falls into the hole, wait
the right amount of time before firing again the flipper to give the ball the
desired trajectory. This is not too hard to learn for a human but probably
quite a challenge both for hardware and software.

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CobrastanJorji
> in animum apparatus iacet victoria

My Latin is pretty bad. Victory lies in the spirit of the machine, maybe? Or
perhaps the spirit of victory lies in the machine?

It sounds like the flippers just fire when the camera identifies that a ball
is somewhere in a zone that will cause the ball to be hit. I'm curious about
doing more than that. I wonder how accurately such a system could aim for a
particular target.

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J_cst
Victory lies etc...

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seisvelas
In that case, wouldn't it correctly be conjugated as 'In animō apparati iacet
victoria'? I haven't touched Latin since boyhood so I'm likely completely
wrong, but I am eager to understand this.

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lultimouomo
Apparatus is forth declension, the genitive form is still apparatus. I agree
that animus should take the ablative.

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amelius
Seems like the perfect problem to apply reinforcement learning to. Just let it
play and learn at the same time.

I think they could even skip the explicit implementation of ball
position/velocity tracking.

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nsl73
I think it would be painfully slow to have it learn in real time, especially
if a grad student had to put the ball in between every game like what is
demoed.

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faceplanted
You could definitely pipe (literally) the ball to the input like in real
pinball machines and trigger a new iteration.

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keyle
As one of the good pinball players in the world, I think my ranking is safe
for now.

They built a drunk pinballer flailing simulator...

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worthless-trash
That is exactly how it starts.

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blaser-waffle
Eventually they're doing speed runs and finding odd magnetic anomalies with
the ball and plungers

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nthitz
[https://aussieazuredevs.github.io/blog/pinball/genesis](https://aussieazuredevs.github.io/blog/pinball/genesis)
Is another group's attempt at using machine learning to play existing real
games.

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fortran77
This would be a good "attract mode" feature to have on a commercial pinball
machine in a bar, etc.

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dave-f
Heh, reminds me of the "Phantom Flip" on the old Monster Bash table:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bash_(pinball)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Bash_\(pinball\))

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karatestomp
"Thing flips" on Addams Family ~6 years earlier. A few machines had things
like that.

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drfuchs
“Well played, Thing; you’re really on the ball!” - Raul Julia, as Gomez.

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karatestomp
I really wish I'd bought one of those back when they were merely hard-to-
justify-on-my-high-school-job-wages expensive rather than hard-to-justify-on-
my-developer-salary-with-a-family expensive. Never imagined they'd appreciate
faster than my disposable income did.

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munichpavel
Very cool! My daughter is getting interested in robotics, and we recently got
an Arduino starter set. This won't be our next project, but it will get us
building more!

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fivetimesfast
Few. Why would I want to play pinball myself.

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wondringaloud
Why did they build the entire pinball machine themselves? The portion that
"plays itself" is a camera attached to some very basic computer vision
techniques that boil down to:

When ball detected in flipper area, flip.

You could attach this to any commercial machine by connecting a relay where
the flipper buttons would be.

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got2surf
Because it's a university senior design project - they often pair students
with related majors together to work on a project over the course of a
semester or two. It's about the interesting engineering of the entire project.
They never claimed any one part of it was "novel" but the project as a whole
clearly is.

