I recently bought an arcade game,( link below) with the hope it was an easy fix, I found the psu to be bad but it turn out there was issues with the main board, dead 5v rail, damaged regulators faulty motor driver and so on,
What im looking to do is replace the whole thing with an arduino, It has 3 motors to to control one to move the carousel left when the button is pressed one to move the arm up when the button is pressed. there is a small ir beam to sense when the game has paid a win
Then there is the coin mech to interface and an 8 segment display to show the amount of plays
I assume the system has a way to detect the carousel and arm location.
It sounds alot of work but im assuming it will all be available already in shield form including some sound fxs
http://www.ttnet.net/ttnet/gotoprd/SP675/010/0/05551303231343333333.htm
So what's your question?
You're probably not going to find a ready-made shield that does what you want. You can easily enough cobble together some components and write some code to make it happen.
You mentioned the motor drivers were bad. You will need motor drivers for the Arduino to control. You could get a motor shield. How does the carousel know that 3 revolutions have occurred? I assume there is some sort of encoder or opto-interrupter to tell that it has made a full revolution? Or perhaps it is just time based and they switch on the motor for X number of seconds?
You'll have to find out more about the coin accepter to find out how it works. It probably pulses a wire to indicate a coin. As for the 7-segment display, you probably could run this directly from 7 digital i/o pins, unless it's more than a single digit or high current. If it's more than 1 digit, you'd need to use a driver chip or a shift register ic.
What im looking to do is replace the whole thing with an arduino, It has 3 motors to to control one to move the carousel left when the button is pressed one to move the arm up when the button is pressed. there is a small ir beam to sense when the game has paid a win
My guess is that a Mega2560 is a better Arduino as it has more SRAM, 4x that of UNO. Unless you are experienced in game design, this is likely to be a frustrating project.
Ray
I doubt he needs anything more than an UNO. Did you look at the photo of the machine? There is no CRT or graphics. It is a mechanical game. The code would probably be less than 100 lines and a handful of variables. No need for 4 times the SRAM.
Xpendable:
I doubt he needs anything more than an UNO. Did you look at the photo of the machine? There is no CRT or graphics. It is a mechanical game. The code would probably be less than 100 lines and a handful of variables. No need for 4 times the SRAM.
Newbies in coding have a difficult time with efficiency. When s/he comes back and ask for suggestions on logic and state, one of the elder members will surely suggest a large array. Now down the road of SRAM consumption we go...
The different in price for the Chinese clones is only 2::1 in the regular Arduino formfactor, that is under $10 for UNO-ish and under $20 for Mega-ish. $10 is a cheap insurance policy!
Ray
Seriously? You're recommending a more expensive board for something that requires at most 4 digital inputs (2 user inputs, 1 coin indicator input, and 1 opto-interrupter for the carousel), 2 motor output signals, and a single 7-seg display... The game logic is so simple that it would probably take 20 lines of code... maybe 100 lines by an idiot. I have trouble seeing how a complete newbie would even come close to hitting the SRAM limit or the program space limit. The original firmware of my MonsterShield (which is about 1000 times more advanced than this thing) was close to maxing the memory, and that was a LOT of code. Not saying that that there aren't times when you need more... but for THIS project? Seriously?
Xpendable:
Seriously? You're recommending a more expensive board for something that requires at most 4 digital inputs (2 user inputs, 1 coin indicator input, and 1 opto-interrupter for the carousel), 2 motor output signals, and a single 7-seg display... The game logic is so simple that it would probably take 20 lines of code... maybe 100 lines by an idiot. I have trouble seeing how a complete newbie would even come close to hitting the SRAM limit or the program space limit. The original firmware of my MonsterShield (which is about 1000 times more advanced than this thing) was close to maxing the memory, and that was a LOT of code. Not saying that that there aren't times when you need more... but for THIS project? Seriously?
Your argument is based on experience, so I will concede to that. The 328P is a great workhorse, and certainly has the I/O to handle the Ops needs. It does seem prudent (in retrospect) to start with the UNO or variant and push that to the limit before jumping to the larger uC.
Thanks for the reality lesson.
Ray