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Three weeks and many long hours after starting, the Lego NXT pinball machine is a reality. This machine is built of over 8000 Lego pieces - the only non-Lego piece is the ball which is a regular steel pinball ball.

6 NXT robots, 9 touch sensors, 10 light sensors and 4 motors are used to power the machine. All of the programming was done with the NXT-G programming language that Lego provides with the robots.

Before building began, a large portion of the machine was designed using MLCad, a free CAD program for designing Lego models on your computer. Rough versions of those electronic models are available in the MLCad Files section of the website. When more time is available the models will be updated to better match the current state of the machine.

Check out the video section of the website to see a gameplay video of the machine in action, and the photo gallery to see construction and final photos of the machine.

The Lego NXT Pinball machine was built by Mark Gryn of the School of Computer Science, University of Windsor and Michael, an 11th grade student who is participating in a co-op program at the University of Windsor.

Inspiration

The inspiration for this Lego NXT Pinball machine came from a machine built by Gerrit Bronsveld & Martijn Boogaarts. Their machine was built back in 2005 using the old version of the Lego robots known as RCX. You can see a nice article on their machine at the Pinball News site.

Both Gerrit & Martijn have galleries showing a number of photos of the machine. These photos were a great help in designing the Lego NXT Pinball machine.

While building the Lego NXT pinball machine, I contacted Martijn a number of times over email and he shared some very useful information and gave some very helpful advice.

Thank you to both Gerrit & Martijn for the inspiration and advice.