We caught a glimpse of this Basic Stamp 2 controlled electronic slot machine on YouTube. We’re very grateful that [Mike Donahue] was willing to share more about his project with us.
He uses tactile switches instead of dropping coins in a slot, and a lever-style switch sets the one-armed bandit in motion. The action is displayed on a 1.5″ µOLED-128-G1 screen that has its own controller (which explains how this operates so well with the relatively slow BS2). For realism there’s some pretty good sound effects provided by a piezo speaker. We’ll look at the code, graphics, and some video after the break.
The connections are quite simple and [Mike] has built the project on the Basic Stamp 2 Homework Board. The display is addressed through two serial lines and a reset pin.
He generated the graphics using MSpaint, creating three full screen images that rarely change. The icons for the spinning dials are much smaller and overlayed on top of the larger images. Three of these icons are stored next to each other in memory. That way, a pointer can be advanced and the next image will start to scroll in, resembling a spinning cylinder. Here’s a bit larger version of the schematic and images if you need it.
This makes for a fun toy and it’s quite well executed. If you’re interested in taking a look under the hood, here’s a copy of the source code.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3BAeWJwGdE]
Careful dude.
You’re going to have some Senior Citizen or another parking themselves in front of that thing and then good luck getting rid of ’em.
I just hope for your sake the buffet is half decent because that show in the Copa Room stank to high heaven.
Oh the project: Well done!
Pretty slick looking, but those things should make a complete rotation before coming to a halt.
To be honest that display controller doesn’t seem particularly impressive. An AVR connected to a Nokia 6610 colour LCD gets much better performance, enough for smooth animation.
For that reason I have always found these screens overpriced. Sure, they have an easy to use interface, but there is so much example code and it’s so easy to work with more basic screens that you might as well just develop your own code optimised for the types of things you want to do.
This is pretty cool, to bad OLED displays are so expensive. $75 for that little screen.
That’s a whole lot of blue…
The manufacture is adamant about minimizing blue usage, since it’s prone to sticking and has the shortest life.
But other than that, Nifty project!
Hafta figure out how to hook this up to a pay machine and sell them to bars around here!
And BTW, thanks Hack A Day for giving the capital letters to us…much easier to read!
very well executed. Good project!
I live in Vegas and work in the casino industry.
Machines are for fools. The machines that look like live games do not have the same physics, the animations are just to trick people. For example, the video BJ games are allowed to shuffle after every hand.
Stick to live table games without continuous shufflers and learn to count cards on BJ, clock the wheel on European Roulette and play poker on live games.
In defense of the uOLED-128: it scrolls much smoother if the sound commands are removed (due to the single-thread limitation of the BS2),there is microSD support on the display, it can be had for $65 from Parallax, and the color intensity is impressive. Thanks for the caution about blue useage, Fallen. Thanks for the comments, all.
Ummm
Good project, was thinking about doing something like this myself. Ended up on the ‘back burners’.
Just one thing Hackaday – Basic Stamp isn’t the first thing I think of when I read BS in the title!
Made me think this was a bit bogus!
Wow that`s sound great. Nice one. I will try to implement it. Thank You for sharing about this slot machine. Slot machines are the best.