Stravinsky's first opera was The Rake's Progress, and for years after he always intended to compose another. In 1953 he met with Dylan Thomas in New York to hash out the details of a libretto for an ambitious opera to be commissioned by Boston University. Several possible scenarios were tossed out, including a postapocalyptic love story and a libretto written by a large number of monkeys on typewriters. As fortune would have it, the poet died before the opera could be realized. This machine tells the story of the unfinished opera using the vernacular designs and mechanisms of pinball.

Design

The game components will tell the story of the opera by combining the following elements:

4 possible scripts
12 characters
12 props
12 locales
26 typewriter keys

Each of the elements is keyed to a target on the playfield and has corresponding LED feedback.

General color guidelines for the design are:

Black and white cross-hatch  
Spot complementary colors: orange/blue, purple/yellow  
Collaged b&w paper images

Components

The various components fall into these categories:

 Manual Input
       Flipper
       Plunger
       Coin op

Automatic mechanisms
    Ball return
    Tilt and bump sensing

Tracked Input
    Targets
    Bumpers
    Holes
    Switches

Output
    Lights
    Sound and music
    Score
    Backglass display

In the triage process of the final week I have focused on getting two output systems working; the LED array drivers and the sound and music generator.

The Electronics

The two working playfield ornaments are based on the Fabian Arduino-compatible board.

The Fluxamafet: sixteen N channel MOSFETs on an Atmega168. Controls banks of LED arrays.

The Fluxamamidi: An Atmega168 that generates MIDI sequences for all the sound effects and music in the game. Can read MIDI patches from an SD card and play back according to script and input.

The Fluxamabox (UNFINISHED): A MIDI to audio sound generator based on the ATSAM2195.

The LED arrays

I started by milling a bunch of breakout boards grouping six LEDs into different configurations:

Coupled with the controller, they formed a dreaded floating octopus of wires:

Although they look nice from the front:

For the next group I decided to use the vinyl cutter, which works well for this kind of application:

Programming interface

A Processing interface for visualizing the array. Because Processing is syntactically similar to Arduino, you can cut and paste the model and upload as working firmware.

Here's the Processing code.

Flippers

For now, the flippers are activated by (120V AC) sewing machine solenoids that I happen to have a lot of. I also have a bunch of 5V electromechanical relays that can switch them. Eventually I will swap these out for two-coil flipper solenoids comparable to those at pinballmedic.net.

The Playfield

Just got my pinball balls in the mail: