This past week I paid a visit to Roger Williams University and met with the Engineering Senior Design Project Team working on a self-contained fog generation system for my “Night of the Living Dead” custom pinball machine.Backglass Design

This is my third meeting with Alexander Gilman, Anthony Melkonian, Richard Mendoza, and Brian Stuckman- the “Pinventions Team” as they are known- and I am very impressed with their progress to date. We first met in late September when they visited my workshop, got a sense of what my business endeavor is all about, and learned about my vision for my zombie pinball machine design.

Meet the Team

The engineering challenges that I gave them were somewhat unique. I had done a lot of research into solving the series of engineering problems associated with this project, and there were no clear-cut answers for some of them. I also was pushing the limit in my requirements and expectations of this design team. For example, my design vision includes:

1. Development of a self-contained fog generation unit that could simulate fog (in a foggy cemetery scene in the back glass of the machine).
2. The fog generation needs to be almost instantaneous.
3. The fog should be controllable to a certain extent- with different modes that can be triggered by different game play actions- for example, fog could be swirling, low-lying, exhausted at the feet of the player, or be capable of being piped to an area beneath the playfield for use in other special effects.
4. The glass areas should be easy to clean, ideally with an automatic or self-contained cleaning system.

These design requirements would necessitate some pretty complex automation, including air handling, temperature control, and integration with older electronics from the base game design. I was a bit worried that this would all be a bit too much for these four students, expecting perhaps a “fun” and easy project (after all- zombies!).

But after our meeting this week I was pleasantly surprised. They had researched and solved the problem of instantly generating fog by hacking some of the electronics from a special kind of electronic cigarette, and they have been working with anti-fogging liquids (ironically) to minimize the need for cleaning the glass. They had completed some basic work on the computerized automation and airflow, constructed an acrylic back glass and constructed a working test/demo unit.

Trust me-There’s fog in the cemetery.

To their credit, they also printed out one part of my back glass design artwork and attached that to the test unit to give it a more realistic look. Even in the brightly lit classroom, the effect was impressive. Considering that they have 2/3 of the school year left to pull it all together, I am confident we will have an impressive prototype to show.

The students tell me that Dr. Linda Riley (program director for RWU Engineering) suggested that their fog generation concept may be worthy of a patent. I tend to agree.

Before I left the meeting, I offered them (and myself!) an even greater challenge- I suggested that they plan for completing their work a month or so early, and I would work to have the rest of the machine design completed and working by then as well- including original artwork for the playfield design as well as some other special effects to make additional use of the fog. Our hope is to put it all together and have the entire working machine there for the final presentation in May 2014.

Thanks to Alex, Anthony, Richard, and Brian for some impressive work to date. I’m looking forward to your presentation at the end of the semester, and to mentoring you all towards the completion of our project.

And finally, a bit of trivia about the theme of the design- “Night of the Living Dead”. Although this classic movie from 1968 is generally regarded as the first of a long line of zombie movies, the word “zombie” was never used in the movie. The flesh-eaters were called “ghouls”.

And now you know…

“Well, hello there! Please don’t call me a zombie.”