A Place to Bury Strangers Pinball (2018) is a DIY pinball game created in collaboration with Mark Kleeb and Andy Wallace, for Death by Audio Arcade. My role was Architectural and System Engineer.
APBSP was constructed from an old, damaged pinball machine that was beyond the point of restoration. We chose, instead of throwing it out, to turn it into a pinball machine of our own. The new design has a custom paint job, and contains a number of microcontrollers, mostly Teensys and Arduinos, that interface with the hardware's bumpers, switches, and lights.
My works was creating a core engine that would coordinate all of the components. I used a Raspberry PI running headless Raspbian Lite, with a python framework that would multiplex input and output from the microcontrollers and keyboard (optionally). This also required interfacing with SDL in order to handle music and sound effect generation. The framework was abstracted from the hardware, and could also communicate over a local TCP socket in order to work with simulated events. This allowed Andy Wallace to make a software simulation of the pinball machine, controllable with the mouse, to develop the gameplay code without needing to be physically present at the machine.
blog post: A Place to Bury Strangers Pinball
