ECE 4760: Final Project (2012)

A Budget Pachinko Machine

Built from Scraps

Joseph Ballerini (jmb596@cornell.edu)

Matthew Newberg (mrn43@cornell.edu)

"A Pachinko machine born of printers, scanners, and scraps."

project soundbyte

Pachinko is a game in which a ball drops down through a large quantity of pegs and the objective is to catch that ball in a fixed basket. The concept behind our machine is novel in that it was built using mostly discarded and salvaged parts. We built a pachinko machine because we wanted to play with one and none were around.

Not all projects have to further scientific advancements or revolutionize the industry. Our design was built for one purpose: fun. Having seen videos of pachinko machines on the internet as well as having played the popular computer game Peggle, we thought the game of pachinko would be fun to play in real life. Though both of us wanted to try out a pachinko machine, they are not common in our area; our only options were to buy one or build one. The machines themselves are relatively expensive and neither of us had the free time to build one. The open ended nature of this project assignment allowed for the perfect opportunity to build one.

Regular pachinko machines drop metal balls to fall through their pegs, our design uses skittles. The skittles add an extra element of fun to the game in that the machine dispenses all scoring skittles to the player. During a quick and informal survey, all players polled would rather eat the skittles than not.

The final product.