Detecting a series of passing objects for a Plinko board

Projects General Guidance
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Hi! First time poster here. I've used Arduinos in combination with sensors before, most recently in a game that used an NFC reader as a controller. I'm looking to do something a bit more ambitious, and design a game that uses a Plinko board as a controller.

In other words - players drop pucks/balls in the top; they bounce around; and the pockets the pucks/balls land in have effects in the game.

I think the most sensible way to do this is to have a series of sensors, one in front of each pocket, that identify a passing object.

Complications and questions:

  • what specific types of sensors make the most sense here? I don't really know the landscape, so any guidance would be helpful.
  • how can I avoid the situation where multiple balls/pucks drop into a single pocket in quick succession and only get counted as a single passing object?
  • This involves wiring at least seven sensors of the same kind to an Arduino; are there any potential pitfalls here?

Thanks so much, and I appreciate any help and guidance here!

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Pucks/Balls are wider in the middle than across the edge.
In a pocket, the puck/ball should be centered with some clearance to get through.

IR light through a small aperture could reflect at an angle to an IR detector behind its own aperture. Have one on each side and when both detect at the same time, you get one blip per object.

like this >O< only wider angle.

I have seen an IR detector in a ballpoint pen barrel used to sense small 'pixels' on a primitive page scanner made from a dot-matrix printer as the paper and read head transport before 1985. It got decent 'fax' images for the time.

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There are many different designs of Plinko board and so before an exact solution can be offered, we need to know exactly what sort of board you have.

I would try first with a reflective optical sensor like this one:-

Reflective opto sensor
Reflective opto sensor1920×1251 92.6 KB

You will need one for every position you want to monitor. Also you should make a frame so you can hold the sensors. You can adjust the distance of the sensor to the board by using a nut an bolt in the long slot in the sensor. This will allow you to tune out any none puck sensor caused by reflections from the background.

The speed of the pucks dropping is a long time compared to the speed the sensors / electronics work, so you have no problems with this.

No, not that I can see. You will just need one input pin per sensor.

Hint just start with one sensor to begin with. That is take it one step at a time.

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