FAST Friends Newsletter: May 2022¶

Hello FAST Friends! We can't believe another month has passed! It feels like just yesterday that Aaron and I were flying home from the Texas Pinball Festival, exhausted yet thrilled that live events were back.

Being in Texas made us realize how much we miss you all. Hanging online and via video has been great, but we all got into pinball because we love the physical world. So you can imagine how excited we are that our own "home" pinball show is just a month away. We will have a huge space there, with at least 12 FAST-powered machines showing off much of what we've announced at TPF, along with many FAST-powered homebrew machines and their creators. (And all four of us from FAST Pinball will be there in person too. Aaron and I are looking forward to Dave joining us on stage for our talk!)

And while this show will be awesome, (ooh and we have a few surprises too which we can't reveal ahead of time), it's also tough because there is SO MUCH GOING ON in the FAST Pinball universe these days that we won't be able to cover everything at the show.

But cool things are happening at FAST Pinball these days. Aaron, Dave, Eli, and I are firing on all cylinders and outrageously excited to show you what we've been working on over the coming months and years!

In the meantime, we hope to see as many of you as possible in person at the NW show next month! (We'll have a videographer there one of the days to shoot video and interviews and capture as much as possible for those of you who can't make it in person.) And I promise we'll keep working hard if you keep making pinball.

Brian (along with Aaron, Dave, & Eli)

Our "local" pinball show is next month. Join us!¶

FAST Pinball is based in the Pacific Northwest / greater Seattle area. Our "local" show is the Northwest Pinball & Arcade show which takes place June 3-5, 2022.

We've always had a pretty big (and fun!) presence at the show, and after a long pandemic break, we're really looking forward to this year's show.

Our FAST booth area has traditionally focused on the fun and community around building custom and homebrew pinball. (The photo above is from the 2018 show. We bring in our own wood panels to create the feel of hanging out in a friend's basement.)

So far this year it looks like we're going to have 12(!) pinball machines in the FAST Pinball exhibit area! We’ll be showing off several classic machines running the FAST Retro Platform controllers (including WPC-89, WPC-95, and System 11), as well as machines based on some of the 2.0 projects we're involved in. Several FAST Pinball community members & friends will be bringing their homebrew machines to the show which we'll have in our booth as well. (If you want to bring a machine and/or volunteer, reach out to me via email, brian@fastpinball.com.)

This year’s NW show looks like it’s going to be our best and most fun ever, and an awesome opportunity for everyone to get out and meet up in person after building things in our basements for the past few years.

Our tech documentation site is live!¶

We've been busily working on publishing the technical documentation for FAST Pinball, and we're happy to share that our docs site is live at fastpinball.com/docs. Check out the site for learning guides, manuals, tutorials, and technical reference material. I'd like to specifically highlight:

• Our 13-part tutorial on how to wire your pinball machine. • First steps to connect your FAST Nano controller to your computer. • Product manuals • FAST Serial Protocol technical reference • Platform docs for the FAST Modern, Retro, and Mod platforms

Aaron was a guest on Marco Pinball's Homebrew Live stream¶

FAST Pinball CEO and cofounder Aaron Davis joined Marco Pinball’s Krystle Gemnich as a guest on the Marco Pinball’s Homebrew Live stream this month. They talked all about the homebrew pinball community and what FAST is up to. You can watch a replay of the show via YouTube.

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