Requesting knowledge before I start

A little about the project I need an Arduino for. I'm designing my own pachinko challenge ball game. Pachinko is a game where you buy steel balls and place them in the machine and launch them around as they fall into score pockets. pockets of the average pachinko just reward you with more balls by complete mechancical means, no electricity, to play with but in the challenge ball versions, which I am trying to make, it comes with 12 balls that sta in the machine and it either light up sections on a bingo board essentially or create a score total.

What I'm trying to accomplish/need:

  1. 7-segment display for score tracking, i need 5 of them
  2. speaker for sound effects. simple small sounds. (I can guess i need a speaker and a storage device of some sort)
  3. stepper motor. i will have a wheel in the center that is activated by a ball drop(ball hits a leaf switch temporarily completing a circuit) i want the wheel to spin in one direction then slowly come to a stop. the wheel itself will have 12 spots on it. each spot will determine an amount to be added to the score. (yet to decide adding sound as it spins)
    3a. there are two pockets that will activate the motor spin.
    ---one will spin the wheel AND add 1000 to the score
    ---the other will spin the wheel two times. adding to the score for both totals won.
  4. a coin sensor. how this works is a coin slides down a chute and will press down on a sensor that looks like a bent paperclip(have to find out what it is so if you know, please tell me! :slight_smile: ) when it trips that sensor, the game begins. I need the score to reset to zero, may have the wheel reset to have the highest score under the arrow(but not score it!) one sound will play, the coin sensor will connect to a lever that raises a gate letting the balls out. after all 12 balls have left, the gate will fall. mechanical means will tell when the balls have left. it trips a temporary leaf switch sending out a quick power signal to the ??arduino?? which tells the gate to fall.
  5. the payout: it rewards in tokens. the tokens are piled in a tube and at the bottom of the tube there needs to be an actuator? when told to, it punches out one token and then retracts. each time it punches out it plays a sound
    5a. there is one pocket that will reward two tokens when a ball drops in it. it ALSO adds 5000 to the score. this may have a sound or may not.

so with these details can you point me in the direction of what board I should get and or Addons? can someone also tell me what exactly is a shield? from the name i gather that it protects the Arduino but from searches, I read its an addon and has funtioncs like a motor. just looking to clear up some confussion. I'm not sure if this is allowed or not but i will direct link you to my post on the pachinko forum where I decribe in more details and have some pictures of my project. www.pachitalk.com/forums/pachinko-modifications/43066-my-challenge-ball-project.html
thank you again for any help you can provide to me.

also tell me what exactly is a shield? from the name i gather that it protects the Arduino but from searches

No, a shield is a board that adds extra chips. It is called a shield because it goes over the board. It could be a motor driver, an SD storage card, WiFi, Ethernet, sound, more input / output and so on. While some shields can be stacked others can't. Also some shields may use the same pins as others so will not work at the same time.
You need to work out in detail what input / outputs you need, you can do most things with a UNO and a few chips but if you don't want to build your own stuff you have to go with shields.

Brief points:

  • shield: the rest of the world calls it a mezzanine board, or some such.
  • sketch: the rest of the world calls it a program.

"pachinko" are definitely noisy contraptions -- Lots of fun....

Two small items -- Perhaps first getting your hands on a used machine and learning the interface ropes inserting an Arduino into it might facilitate your project of creating a machine from scratch... The other regarding the segmented display, why not simply get in integrated display (unless you're into that kind of stuff already).

Have fun!