Just curious, are these addressable - or could they be ?
Pinball info
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Led light bars
- Thread starter AlanJ
- Start date
OP
OP
Yes, he added the extra diode, FYI, I tried various LEDs in my goldball, all flickered badly, so stuck with incandescent. I'm now wondering if a small capacitor across the led will hold enough charge to keep the led on during the 1/2 cycle when it is not powered?
OP
OP
No they are not, that is a project I am working on though - ie a similar design of the Ledbar board but with an addressable LED on it - it will then have a two 3 way headers on it - one will carry the power in and the data in, the other will carry the power and data out to the next LED.
Then we will have a new board that replaced the old bally lamp driver board which will use an "arduino" to interpret the mpu lamp data and send the right signals to the right led to illuminate it. it will be a case of mapping each addressable led to the corresponding game led. Once that is done, then of course we can start doing some really interesting lighting effects, e.g say you achieve 2X bonus, rather than just lighting the 2X light we can run a quick flash of all the lamps. or whatever we want. Effectively this would bring RGB lighting with full lighting animations to old SS games!!!!! - By also tapping into the other MPU signals, we could figure out if in attract mode, for example, and do all sorts of fancy stuff.
Sounds interesting for sure. I was thinking more for your mish mash machines. But an ardunio driving lamp driver board sounds interesting for sure.
Im guessing youve already looked into grabbing the lamp data from the MPU ?
Im guessing youve already looked into grabbing the lamp data from the MPU ?
OP
OP
My Mishmash machine has addressable LEDs in, so that's easy. Rather than using individual leds, I just stapled in a premade string of addressable leds. It's a bit messy, so if I was gong to create a commercial product tp sell, it might not be the best solution.
Retrofitting to an existing game is trickier. The lamp data is pretty easy - there is 4 digit address 0-14 and 4 bank select wires 4 X 15 = 60 controlled lamps. Then of course there is aux lamp driver boards in some of the later games but I imagine is similar. A game like spectrum has 2 lamp driver boards = 120 lamps, so probably leave that one for later! Figuring out if the game is in a game, or in attract mode, or in self test mode, is a bit harder, but I have already done all that within another project, just by examining the data going out to the score displays.
Maybe I'll get round to it in 2024, unless you fancy a pop at it?
Id deffo give it a go. Though I should maybe finish the other 2 arduino things I start. The roadshow mod I just need to try hooking up the lamps and make sure it works ok then try fitting it. (Maybe make a wee circuit board to connect the lamps and a connector for the little display)
The boards came back for my Cosmic project - but the pesky thing has also started resetting itself again on double flips. Which I thought had been cured - apparently not. I want to fix that before I got fiddling around adding stuff.
The boards came back for my Cosmic project - but the pesky thing has also started resetting itself again on double flips. Which I thought had been cured - apparently not. I want to fix that before I got fiddling around adding stuff.