Newbie Here, Wanted to know the best approach to interface a computer with a pinball/arcade machine. Wanted to capture any button actions, c?

I would recommend the Teensy. It's quite close to an Arduino, but is used just for implementing USB HIDs, like keyboards/mice. It has support for multiple keypresses (6 non-modifier keys at once), and getting it to recognise your buttons should just be a matter of wiring them up.It's supposed to be very easy to use, and is also relatively cheap, around $20 US.

Once you had it connected to the arcade machine, it should be as simple as running a daemon to check for the USB keypresses, and using that information how you'd like. It's programmed in either C, or a C-like language, and from what I've seen is very easy to code for.

I haven't dabbled with Teensy, but all respect to that solution, it looks good. I offer an alternative which I have used repeatedly. Get a cheapie $10 game pad and solder onto where the buttons are.

This has the advantage that you can do everything in programming which you are comfortable with. There is plenty of source code on the net to get game pad input into your language. Absolutely minimum electronics knowledge required.

You have multiple on/off buttons, as well as if you have 2 analogue thumbsticks, that gives you 4 analogue inputs. If you remove the thumbsticks you will find 4 variable resistors which you could do funky things with. Like, Show in real time the actual position of the flippers rather than just the on/off of the flipper buttons.

Also you could measure how far back the plunger was pulled etc. On the plus side, you won't have to mess with third party software and drivers etc. It is all written into windows for you already. There is a few down sides though. One is that you don't get the neatly laid out ready to go straight line of pins that the Teensy has.

On the plus side, with a usb gamepad you can treat the input as it's own signal, instead of emulating keyboard presses. This leaves your normal keyboard alone to be used at the same time without interference. Also, keep in mind that a pinball machine is way back in the history of electronics.

The current is pretty high to drive those solonoids. Certainly high enough to fry modern low powered stuff, so you probably don't want to drive your inferface by directly wiring to the buttons. You can however use this to your advantage.

The current going to the solonoids from the buttons should be ample to drive both the solonoid and a the coil of a relay that you add in parallel. Then you have a simple on/off switch output from the relay that goes straight to your interface. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay Good luck.

I use these in an arcade machine I built. It's a "keyboard emulator" that maps button presses to keystrokes: ultimarc.com/ipac1.html You run the wiring from your buttons to the pins on the "ipac" and plug a USB cable into your computer. The end result is when you press the "player 1 start" button, it sends the "1" key command, for example (the buttons mappings are configurable).

That would probably cover inputs (coin insertion, button presses, etc). Not sure about the outputs (scoreboard).

I was going to 2nd the I-PAC solution - but no where on that page do they talk about n-key roll over. If that is not part of the package - you might run in to problems missing events when the action gets intense. For that matter - if you can stand only having 1, 2 maybe 3 key roll over you could always hack a really cheap keyboard.

Most keyboard have a controller the size of a package of gum. Extract this and add switches in a matrix. I would put switches along the diagonal of the matrix before adding other switches.

That is, add switches such that no two switches share a connection to the controller. This should allow the most roll over. Then, if necessary, add more switches trying to keep the sharing of connections back to the controller at a minimum.

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