The Coin Door (Return Button Hack)

Holy bananas - an actual update?!?!?!?

As previously mentioned (like 3 months ago), having to insert a quarter every time I want to play a game is a huge pain. However, it will be nice to be able to limit Bella's play time because I can just give her $5 in quarters or something and let her play until it's gone (this should also force her to get better if she wants to stretch that $5). When I'm playing, I don't want the hassle of popping in a quarter every single time so I needed to do something about it.

I thought about it for a while and did some research over at BYOAC and decided the easiest way to do this was to install a microswitch behind the coin return buttons. When the coin return button is pressed, it will trip the microswitch sending the signal to the computer. The hardest part was figuring out the placement of the microswitch and how to get it to stay in place.

Here are a couple of "before" shots of the back of the coin door. The yellow plastic is the return button and the red plastic is what will come into contact with the microswitch I'm installing.

I couldn't attach the micrswitch directly to the plastic on the coin mech because the cherry button on the microswitch would not be activated in this position. My lovely wife suggested using some fireplace kindling as a shim - what a great idea! I cut the shim to size and then positioned the microswitch on it so it would be activated once the coin return button was pressed - I marked everything with a sharpie and then glued everything together in one shot using some Gorilla Glue and a spring clamp. Check it out:

Finally, I ran the wires in parallel from the actual coin door switch to my newly positioned microswitch. The last shot really gives you a good idea how the whole thing works. The yellow coin return button is pressed which pushes the red plastic into the cherry actuator on the microswitch. Pretty cool.


Now that the coin door is set up, I can insert coins whenever I want but if I don't tell anyone, maybe I can sucker a few friends into dropping some quarters in the machine!