Anyone who used a Windows PC in the late 1990s remembers 3D Pinball for Windows — Space Cadet, the spaceship-themed table that shipped with the operating system. Australian maker CNCDan is building a real, physical version of it from scratch: 3D-printed mechanisms, laser-cut acrylic, solenoids fired by code, and even working wormholes that grab the ball with magnets and spit it back out.
This second video in the series is full of the kind of problem-solving that makes maker builds fun to watch. To keep the flipper coils from overheating when a player holds the button, he uses pulse-width modulation to drop them to about 20% power after the first half second — quoting Technology Connections on the alternative: "coils that overheat tend to get melty and smoky and on rare occasions fiery."
He prints metal-ring bumpers, tests a flipper by dropping a ball on it from 1.5 meters, and switches to a 20mm ball because, as commenters pointed out, the smaller ball is "slightly less destructive." He's posting the build files on Patreon as he finalizes each part.
Previously:
- Check out Tanner Petch's weird homebrew pinball machines
- Pinball machine made from car door lock mechanism
