I have finished the crane movement and electromagnet circuits. I had an issue with the Y axis motor drawing too much power and reseting the Arduino board so I added a second power supply to seperate the motors from the logic. The electromagnet only pics up one pachinko ball at a time. I’m using a 100 ohm resiter with a high wattage. I think I’ll replace it so it can pick up atleast two balls at a time.

    Well here is the first post about the crane game. If you want to see how the progress is going visit the Gallery here. I saw a similar crane game online and thought it looked fun. This project is taking along time (as do most of mine), but it is moving along a bit each day. Originaly I was going to use an old computer as the main controler, but I found this great development board call the Arduino. The board is perfect for this game. One nice thing is it boots up very fast. No more waiting for windows to load before you can start pumping quarters in! I started this game about 2 or three years ago and it has been sitting for a long time. I have the crane gantryworking as well as the joysticks and electromags. I wired up the dumptruck to a servo and all that is left is some game elements. I want to put a pachinko like board at the back that you have to drop the little balls into to score points and bonuses. I’ll post more as I add to this game.