New Life Games Tech Forums

Hi all, I am glad I found this forum.
I have been in the slot industry for about 20 years from software engineer to game design.  As a hobby, I like to experiment with embedded devices, and when I got my first Raspberry Pi, I knew this was the device that would do a fantastic job interfacing to the machines.
I set out to design a board that would have all of the features I needed to do both a progressive controller and SAS communications.  I recently ran a successful Kickstarter in order to get back most of my development costs.

You can read about the device here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/722032672/non-volatile-4mb-f-ramdisk-for-the-raspberry-pi-ex

The Kickstarter project was written to be a bit more mainstream than what we like to do here, but you can see the advantages of this board. Real Time clock, RS232, RS485 with full 9 bit support, a unique electronic ID, and fast truly non-volatile FRAM for not losing important information.  The 4MB F-RAM daughter card is overkill in the slot world (unless you want to keep your ticket database here), but leaving it unpopulated allows you to easily wire your RS485 multi-drop networks using standard Cat5 cables.

In combination with the RasPi, with it's fantastic hardware H264 decode, ethernet and linux, I think I have everything needed to do some fantastic things on the slot floor.

Like I said, I ran the kickstarter campaign to recoup my development costs, and I have a bunch of these boards that I need to build and ship to my backers. I really didn't plan on selling these after that point, but since I found this forum, and many of you are like minded, if you are interested please respond below, and based on that response, I can see if I can make a few available.

Thanks,
Shawn

Hi Shawn - Welcome to NLG

I have backed several projects on Kickstarter - Not sure why I missed Yours.
Although probably overkill for a home based system ( a 8 bit micro can do most of what needs to be done ) the low cost and size of the raspberri Pi does make it an ideal candidate for more complex slot systems.
I would be interested in Your board and also any tips on properly manipulating the 9th bit from linux.
Please keep us posted this sounds like a great project.
 

Hello

Im interested!! Add me to the list.

I know the Ras-Pi board  and i have been working with a little bit.

Ask me if you need help!!