For our private party some weeks ago we prepared a fun slot machine in the spirit of GNU open source software (I’m aware that this might sound contradictory). We already had an old internet cafe terminal but had to change the internal hardware to more recent components. Then we were ready to install a most basic ArchLinux system and configured it to launch X and our PyGame application at startup.
A real slot machine needs some fancy colored buzzers for authentic gamble feeling. So we developed some in Blender and 3d printed them. They are wired to a tiny USB-Arduino and on key press, they will trigger generic key press events on the system.
Since we haven’t been able to get the “coin entry” machine working, we checked the credit with a barcode scanner which was further connected to our party payment system :)
Here’s a demo video:
And here you can get our unenhanced, hacky source code. Note that we removed all original sounds and graphics to avoid copyright infringement.
Update (December 2017): We are proud to note that our project got featured on the front page of Heise Online, one of the leading technology news sites in Germany. In addition to the online publication, an even longer article was printed in the C’t Make magazine of 6/2017 (page 104-105).
