Project Solar Ride 2004

Introduction

Project Solar Ride 2004 was started on approximately March 7, 2004. I had acquired a crappy but fully wired Solar Ride pinball playfield a couple of years ago for a small cost. Originally I was going to use this for spare parts or to build a pinball playfield with a new design.

However, as my desire to learn electronics and build games increased, I thought it would be pragmatic to start with a pre-existing wired playfield and learn to control it. Thus the laborious step of having to acquire pinball components, design a playfield then layout it and physically wire it was eliminated. I could get right to the heart of the matter of getting the electronics and architecture going. Reducing the scope reduces the time to completion which increases the probability of project success. Small baby steps.

My good friend Harry B Stoner did a lot of the work. What follows here are the original project goals written in March. Where things changed significantly from the original design or goals, I've updated the text in square brackets.

Please see the other project pages for gory details. The dev log is basically Harry's daily diary of work, intermixed with bits of test results, theories and thoughts. Not being electronics gurus, please be warneed that technical inaccuracies could abound. Please contact us with any questions or corrections.

Update July 2006: A lot of the pages were written with the project in progress. Go to the Finished Result page to read the post mortem and look at pix of the finished pinball machine.

Updates

• July 17, 2006 - added the finished result page and fixed links.
• April 15, 2005 - added the game details page.
• January 6, 2005 - added some details on the architecture page.

Last updated: September 26, 2008