I decided to build my own pinball. What am I getting myself into?

I'm a pinball fan. I actually own a pinball machine and I really like to play pinball machines. I got hooked with pinball when I was a kid in the 80s. Some of my favourite machines are KISS, Xenon, Flight 2000, Firepower, Blackout and Dr. Dude.

I also like to build things. Mechanical en electronic things. I've been building guitar pedals for a few years, and repairing (or trying to) old Home Computers.

And I like to find challenges, things that motivate me to create new things, no matter how difficult. Things that make me learn new abilities. So my next obvious project headed towards a homebrew pinball...

The idea

Considering that building a homebrew pinball machine is an expensive, long and difficult project, I wanted to simplify the project as much as possible. No fancy features, complex mechanics, etc. My obvious conclusion was to clone an existing pinball machine, one from the late 70s or early 80s, and create a new theme for it. These solid-state machines are simple but fun, so it's a great base for a project like this. I will also use all the tools available out there, meaning that I'll buy existing software and hardware, and rely on existing solutions.

After a lot of research and thought, I decided to use William's Warlok as the base machine. Its playfield is almost identical to Blackout. And the rules are very similar to Stern's Meteor, which are very good and entertaining, but with a couple trick shots that make it unique.

The hardware will be existing playfield elements, a RaspberryPi 5 as the main CPU, Mission Pinball Framework as the software to control the logic of the game and Cobra Pin as the hardware to control the elements.

And the theming will be Roller Derby. There are many reasons for this. On one side, I really love this sport, and I'm in the process of becoming an NSO/Referee. On the other, it's an inclusive sport, mostly run by women, and I hope that by choosing this theme it may encourage more women to play pinball and/or watch roller derby. And finally, my little 9yo nice loves both pinball and roller derby, and I want to make something that she likes, to encourage her to keep playing pinball and be a fan/player of roller derby.

Following progress

So, in the event you are interested in following along, I will make several things to make this project available to everybody: I will keep a blog of the progress, either here or on Vila Industries' website (I need to setup a blog there, though).

Another way I'm thinking of is making videos, and uploading them to the YouTube channel, or even PeerTube (though I need to create an acount in one of the instances, most probably MakerTube). This will add a lot of work for me, but I think it may be worth it, as showing how to do things with video is sometimes way more useful than just showing static images on a page.

And I will most probaly post updates and news on Mastodon and Bluesky.

And that's it. I hope you are interested and follow along. It's a bit intimidating to me, but an exciting challenge. Let me know what you think by commenting on the Mastodon Post. Cheers!

P.S.: I'm announcing this today because it's my birthday. Happy birthday to me! 😄🎂