Announce: Translucent Early Solid State Pinball Buttons/Housings

I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of the C904 Housings and C905 buttons in 10 different pinball friendly translucent colors. The Colors are intended to closely match the colors of many pinball plastics such as lane guides, star posts, and switched inserts and are intended to be back-lit with LEDs. These new buttons are replacement parts for the following manufacturers / Part numbers:

  • Buttons:
    • Bally C-905 button
    • Gottlieb B-16680 button
    • Stern / Chicago Coin Machine 4B-200 button
  • Housings:
    • Bally C-904 housing
    • Gottlieb C-13900 bushing
    • Stern / Chicago Coin Machine 4B-199 housing

The Gottlieb BUSHING FOR DOUBLE PUSHBUTTON #B-21018 is not currently available; however, it should be possible to modify our buttons easily to replicate them. I’ll try to spend some time in the future to publish a how-to-modify here in this blog if there is interest.

These buttons are available in the following translucent colors:

  • Yellow,
  • Amber,
  • Orange,
  • Red,
  • Blue,
  • Green,
  • and Purple.

Additionally we’ve created some unique custom colors which should be of interest to the pinball community:

  • Clear
  • Teal,
  • and Smoke Black.

We also have some limited stock of:

  • Lime Green,
  • Smoke-Blue,
  • and Light Purple.

Colors are show below and should represent the colors available. Please Note:Keep in mind your monitor and my camera’s color balance will throw the colors off a bit from the actual product you receive so use these as an approximation of what will be shipped to you.

Pinball Button

C905 Translucent Pinball Buttons

The Housings:

Pinball Button Housing

C904 Pinball Housing

C904 Translucent Pinball Button Housings

Both the Housings and Buttons are made out of PMMA (Acrylic) so they can be easily laser etched and paint filled like I did on my Original Bally Star Trek Restoration.

Please let us know if there is a color not represented here… or if you’d like to see some opaque colors made.

To buy a set for you Pinball Machine; please see the following product page:
http://pinball-mods.com/oscom/index.php/cPath/28

Bally Flipper Button Mod

I’d also like to call Attention to a product we’ve had on the website for a couple of months… The Bally Flipper Mod was designed by myself several years ago for the Bally Star Trek Restoration. Each PCB features 12 LEDs in either Red or Green and rotated the LEDs to simulate a rotating pattern. I’ve held off announcing them here because I wanted to get the companion buttons on the website so fellow Pinheads would have the option of buying them with the colored button of their choice – IE one stop shopping.

This Flipper button mod is available as a 2 PCB set and looks like this in Green:

Here are a couple of videos of the Red in action:

Green LEDs:

Please take a gander at our product page:
http://pinball-mods.com/oscom/product_info.php/products_id/5
for more information or to purchase this modification.

Custom Buttons & Housings (Early Bally, Gottlieb, Stern, Chicago Coin)

My Shapeway’s store should be open to purchase early SS or late EM buttons and housings. You can visit the store at:

http://www.shapeways.com/shops/Pinball-Mods

You can buy in single button / housing configurations or in pairs allowing you to configure the colors as you want. The buttons work interchangeably with the original housings and vice-versa. At the moment; I have 13 color and/or materials available:

Blue nylon
Purple Nylon
Pink Nylon
Yellow Nylon
Green Nylon
Orange Nylon
Matte Black Nylon
Smooth Black
Polished Metallic Plastic
Grey Nylon /w metallic sparkle
Translucent clear
Matte Translucent clear
Matte Frosted Translucent Clear

I do not offer White or Red Opaque buttons in the store as they come much cheaper from PBR or Marco. I understand the prices are high; it’s what Shapeways’ charges for the material. I guess it’s the cost of customization.

At this point; I offer the following part numbers at the shop:

  • Buttons:
    • Bally C-905 button
    • Gottlieb B-16680 button
    • Stern / Chicago Coin Machine 4B-200 button
  • Housings:
    • Bally C-904 housing
    • Gottlieb C-13900 bushing
    • Stern / Chicago Coin Machine 4B-199 housing
    • Gottlieb BUSHING FOR DOUBLE PUSHBUTTON #B-21018

Here’s some pictures I took of the housing in polished metallic plastic and the button in frosted detail:

GTB Black Hole repo-ed fuse cards

While finishing up my Black Hole project; I found the need to replace my rotted fuse cards with some fresh replacments.

Before:

After:

Thanks to Jim (Gott Lieb?) on RGP for helping me figure out the garbled wording. This post has been updated with the fixed WARNING card.

I’ve made the file available in PDF form so Black Hole owners can replace the fuse cards on their machine.

These resulting PDF file is licensed under the Non-Commercial Creative Commons license.

Gottlieb Black Hole Fuse Cards

Gottlieb Open Source PopBumper Driver Board?

I just successfully; built my prototype Gottileb PBDB design and have tested them in my Black Hole Pinball project at AustinModders.com. I have decided to release this  design under to the public under the TAPR Non-Commercial Open Hardware License which indicates:

You may make products based upon this design, provided you do not make more than ten units in any twelve month period for your personal use.

The design include the recommended fixes from marvins u-fix it site including both  Power and Fire LEDs. It also features protection circuitry including a barrier diode and a resettable fuse to try an prevent damage to other devices in your machine. The Logic on this board is Low-Voltage tolerant; so it should operate in situations where +5V is low.

The design uses the more readily available and cheaper TIP120 transistor for driving the popbumper coils.

Schematics :

Click to view GTB PBDB FabB Schematics in PDF

The PCB is designed as a pair; IE you get two boards in the same foot print as the original. I designed it this way to minimize PCB cost, aid in building multiple units, and enabling the boards to be snapped apart after assembly. The board is a two layer PCB with mostly surface mount parts on the top layer to minimize PCB real estate. The TIP120 driver transistor is mounted on the bottom layer again to keep the board size low.

PBDB Fab B Top Layer w/ Silkscreen
PBDB Bottom w/ Silkscreen

For those without PCB layout tools; a set of two bare PCBs are available from the batchpcb service for under $28. You can purchase the boards from this link:
http://batchpcb.com/index.php/Products/44762

The Bill Of Materials (BOM) of a pair of boards is available from Digikey for $10.70 (as of the time of this post). A CSV file with the digikey part numbers is here: A8_PBDB.bom.csv

Here’s a package of the materials above as a single download: GTB_A8_PBDB_pkg.zip

Here are some pictures of the prototypes assembled and installed:

Edit jzitt 11/4/2010 to add batchpcb order link