System Overview

The pinHeck system is a microcontroller-based pinball machine control system developed by Benjamin J Heckendorn and Parker Dillman.

The system contains (2) microcontrollers:

Microchip® PIC32MX795F512 processor, 32 bit, operating at 80MHz

PIC32 for short. This is the heart of the system. It runs your game code and drives everything except for DMD and audio. A fully programmed pinball kernel will operate at approximately 10,000Hz (or 10,000 cycles per second)

Parallax Propeller P8X32A, 32 bit, operating at 80MHz

Propeller for short. The Propeller has 8 cores that operate in true parallel fashion (no interrupts) and this makes it ideal for the audio-visual portions of the pinball machine. It is connected to the PIC32 via a SPI-like bus. The PIC32 sends it commands such as "Play Music" "Run DMD animation" and "Update Score" and the Propeller executes.