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Tutorial 4: Adjust your flipper power

This is part of our Getting Started guide.

The guide starts here.

It's been awhile since this tutorial has been updated. If you find anything that is no longer relevant, please let us know, or better yet, edit or update it yourself!

We casually mentioned in the previous step that MPF uses a very low default power setting for coils--mainly because we don't want to risk blowing apart some 40-year-old coil mechanism with a power setting that's too high. (Ask us how we know this! :)

So at this step in the tutorial, we're going to look at how you can adjust and fine-tune the power of your flipper coils. The good news is that everything you learn here will 100% apply to all the other coils in your machine (slingshots, pop bumpers, ball ejects, the knocker, drop target resets, etc.)

1. Adjust coil pulse times

Modern pinball controllers that MPF uses have the ability to precisely control how long (in milliseconds) the full power is applied to a coil. (Longer time = more power.) This is called the "pulse time" of a coil, as it controls how long the coil is pulsed when it's fired.

You can set the default pulse time for each coil in the coil's entry in the coils: section of your config file. If you don't specify a time for a particular coil, then MPF will use a default pulse time of 10ms.

So in the last step, we got your flipper coils working, but as they are now, they each use 10ms for their pulse times. (Remember for flippers we're talking about the strong initial pulse to move the flipper from the down to up position. Then after that pulse is over, if you have dual-wound coils, the main winding is shut off while the hold winding stays on, and if you have single wound coils the pulse time specifies how long the coil is on solid for before it goes to the on/off pwm switching.)

So right now your flippers have a pulse time of 10ms. But what if that's too strong? In that case you risk breaking something. Or if your coil is too weak, then your ball will be too slow or not be able to make it to the top of the playfield or up all your ramps. So now you have to play with different settings to see what "feels" right.

Unfortunately there's no universal pulse time setting that will work on every machine. It depends on how many windings your coils have, how worn out your coils are, how clean your coil sleeves are, how tight your flipper bats are to the playfield, how free-moving your linkages are, and how much voltage you're using. Some machines have coil pulse times set really low, like 12 or 14ms. Others might be 60 or 70ms. Our 1974 Big Shot machine has several coils with pulse times over 100ms. It all really depends.

You adjust the pulse time for each coil by adding a default_pulse_ms: setting to the coil's entry in the coils: section of your config file. (Notice that you make this change in the coils: section of your config, not the flippers: section.) So let's try changing your flipper coils from the default of 10ms to 20ms. Change your config file so it looks like this:

coils:
  c_flipper_left_main:
    number: 00
    default_pulse_ms: 20
  c_flipper_left_hold:
    number: 01
    allow_enable: true
  c_flipper_right_main:
    number: 02
    default_pulse_ms: 20
  c_flipper_right_hold:
    number: 03
    allow_enable: true

Notice that we only added default_pulse_ms: entries to the two main coils, since the hold coils are never pulsed so it doesn't matter what their pulse times are. Now play your game and see how it feels. Then keep on adjusting the default_pulse_ms: values up or down until your flippers feel right. In the future we'll create a coil test tool that makes it easy to dial-in your settings without having to manually change the config file and re-run your game, but we don't have that yet. You might find that you have to adjust this default_pulse_ms: setting down the road too. If you have a blank playfield then you might think that your coils are fine where they are, but once you add some ramps you might realize it's too hard to make a ramp shot and you have to increase the power a bit. Later on when you have a real game, you can even expose these pulse settings to operators via the service menu.

2. Adjusting coil "hold" strength

If you're using single-wound flipper coils, you should also take a look at the default_hold_power: values. (Again, to be clear, you only have to do this if your flippers have a single winding. If you have dual-wound coils then the hold winding is designed to be held on for long periods of time so you can safely keep it on full strength solid and you can skip to the next step.)

We don't have any good guidance for what your default_hold_power: values should be. Really you can just start with a value of 0.125 or 0.25 and then keep increasing it (0.0 for 0% power to 1.0 for 100% power) until your flipper holds are strong enough not to break their hold when a ball hits them. Some hardware platform have additional options for fine-turning the hold power if this setting result in weird buzzing sounds or don't feel right. See the coils: section of each hardware platform's How To guide for details for your platform.

By the way there are a lot of other settings you can configure for your flippers. (As detailed in the flippers: section of the config file reference.) They're not too important now, but we wanted to at least look at the power settings to make sure you don't get too far into this tutorial with a risk of burning them up.

3. Check out the complete config.yaml file so far

If you want to see a complete config.yaml file up to this point, it's available in the "tutorials" folder of the mpf-examples package that you should have downloaded in Step 1 of this tutorial.

There are config files for each step, so the config for Step 4 should be at /mpf-examples/tutorial/config/step_4.

You can run this file directly by switching to that folder and then running the following command:

C:\mpf-examples\tutorial>mpf

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