Engineering Applications

Engineering Design Notebook

Copy of justin brown Engineering Notebook Template

Pinball museum field trip

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Unique mechanical component

When the players ball hits the specified target the unique mechanical component moves back and forth. The space ship moves back and forth because of a spring underneath the floor of the machine.

Ball Guide

The ball guide's purpose is to give the ball a special route around the machine. The player can get onto the special route by hitting the ball up the ramp. Once it goes up the ramp it will slowly rolls back down the ramp until it returns the the flippers.

Ball return

This image shows a ball return. A ball return is the area at the base of the machine, near the pinball hitter and the flippers. It's purpose is to return the ball when it gets the the bottom of the machine. The machine is slanted towards the player and the ball return is slanted to the right.

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Scoreboard

The scoreboards purpose is to keep track of the players total points and remaining ball count. It keeps track of the score by adding a certain amount of points every time the play completes a task. Every time the ball rolls past a sensor at the bottom of the machine the count goes down by 1.

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Pinball hitter

What the player uses to hit the pinball onto the gameboard and begin the game

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Targets

This videos shows the targets the player is aiming for. Once you hit one of these targets you get points.

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Flippers

This video shows the pinball machines flippers. These flippers are your lifeline in the game and are what you use to hit the ball back up the ramp.

Servo

In this image you can see a little ghost. The ghost is connected to a servo. This servo moves once the player has completed a certain action or reached a certain amount of points.

Scoring system

The scoring system is the system that adds point to your total score. Every time you hit a target or bumper you get a certain amount of points, and this is where they are shown.

Theme

The theme of this pinball machine was Star Trek. Theme is a very important asset to a pinball machine is it makes the player feel most emersed and interested in your game.

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Lights

This machine makes good use of lights. They blink and flash on and off when the player meets a certain requirment.

Scoreboard

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Today in class, we designed a scoreboard and a mount for a scoreboard. The scoreboard displayed the number of lives the player has remaining and the score the player has reached. Once the player loses the game, the screen displays that the player lost, and to restart the game, the player must click both buttons at once. Every time the player scores, the scoreboard updates instantly, and every time the player loses a life, the life count goes down by one. The mount was made on Onshape and Inkscape. I used Onshape to make the shape with the cutout for the screen, and I used Inkscape to put images and words onto the face of the mount. After I was done, I uploaded the design to Glowforge and laser cut it out of some 1/8 inch medium basswood plywood.

Ball Return

Our ball return uses the ball to complete a circuit, which tells the Pico computer to lower the ball count. One point of our ball return is that the electrical circuit is run through the screws that hold the ball count down. This makes the wiring of the ball return very low profile.

Plunger

This is the pinball plunger. Its purpose is to hit the ball into the game field. Once you pull back the handle and release, the ball will shoot upwards into the playing space. I made it with a long hex bolt, 4 washers, 3 springs, and some digitally fabricated wood pieces. For the handle, I drilled a hole in the handle and used some epoxy resin to hold in a nut. This nut is used to connect to the bolt and make it easy to take on and off the handle at will.

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The flipper's purpose is to hit the ball into targets and flippers and prevent the ball from falling into the ball guide, losing a point. We designed the flippers to surround a rectangular piece of wood on both sides of the board. Beneath the board lies a solenoid, and once activated, the solenoid hits the flipper, causing it to move both on the top and bottom sides, hitting the ball if timed correctly. For the code, we made it so that if the buttons on the sides of the machines were pressed, the solenoids at the bottom of the machine. Additionally, we made it so that after you lose the game, the player can press both flipper buttons at once to restart the game.

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Final pinball Flippers

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Pinaball Targets

At the start of 2025, my partner and I independently worked on designing our own unique designs for targets. I laser cut wood with finger joints so that they would fit together strongly, and I put a switch inside the mount to add points whenever the user scored on that target. Every time the user scores a target, they receive 50 points, and if the user scores 300 points without losing a life, they will unlock a special area.

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Servo Component

This component interacts with the ball, allowing it to enter or not enter the bumper area.

The servo activates if the player manages to get 300 points without losing a life. If it turns on, the opens a door to the bumper area for 30 seconds.

I laser cut a stack of wood to completely surround the servo while leaving the top exposed. In the middle of the base there are some hidden screws to connect to the board. The door was made by laser cutting wood pieces in a way that we could connect them together strongly. After that we used screws to connect the door to the top of the servo.

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Bumper Componet

If the ball manages to make contact with the bumper, the ball will be pinched between the cone of the bumper and the gameboard. This will cause the ball to shoot out in the direction it came. Each time the player activates the bumper, they will earn 100 points. Below are the parts needed to assemble my design. We used a combination of wood glue, finger joints, and screws to hold the whole design in place. On the top left is the top-down view of my finished bumper. For the code, we made it so that if the electrical circuit is complete, then the solenoid will go off and give the player 100 points. Below that, you can see a video of the bumper in action. Finally, beneath that is an image of my mount for the solenoid to the board.

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NeoPixel Lights

We added neopixels to our pinball machine. The purpose of the neopixels is to add effects when something happens on the board. My partner designed a code function using the Asyncio library to make it easy to add customizable blinking lights that work without interrupting the main code. There are three sets of lights on our pinball machine: the bottommost blinks red when you lose a ball, the middle turns green when you activate the servo component, and the top, which encircles the bumpers, blinks when the bumpers are set off.

Unique Mechanical Component

Our unique mechanical component is a spinner that slows and guides the ball. We developed it as a response to user feedback that the ball moved too fast at launch. This solved the problem, and now the ball is an appropriate speed for the user to play with. We developed this component with a pencil, duct tape, some laser-cut wood, and a bearing. The bearing allows the triangular shape on top of the board to spin with very little friction/resistance.

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Pinball machine gameboard design

This has been the hardest project I have ever done in my life because I have spent countless hours and weekends working on completing the project on time. The most important skill I have learned from this project is creative design and problem-solving skills. Because I have had to design and redesign each component of my machine multiple times. I am most proud of the bumper design because I spent much time creatively making the bumper mount compact so they could be right next to each other on the board. This is our final pinball machine. It is fully playable with complete interactions between all electrical and mechanical components.

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