This library interfaces with the Spike 2 hardware used in recent Stern pinball machines. It is intended to be used by custom software running on the pinball machine itself to control the pinball hardware. It cannot interact with the pinball hardware from a different machine.
The included demo application provides a virtual keyboard driver that translates switch events into keyboard events. You can see it in action being used to play Doom II here:
Briefly:
- Cross-compile for
armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf - Copy your app onto the game's storage
- Run it.
If you want to use the virtual keyboard driver in the demo application, you'll also need to build a uinput kernel module for the Linux version running on the Spike 2 CPU. This is needed to synthesize virtual keyboard events.
I'm not going to provide more detailed instructions at this time because I don't want to be responsible for you damaging your expensive pinball machine.
If you have it working and have specific questions, feel free to email me.
This currently only handles node bus initialization and processing switch inputs. That was all that was needed for Doom.
Supporting solenoids and lamps would require adding support for a handful of additional node bus messages. I didn't mess with them as I didn't have any reason to and I wanted to minimize the risk of me doing a dumb.
Mission Pinball Framework's MPF to Spike bridge provided good clues for understanding the message numbers and structure of the node bus protocol.