Lights. Aaaw yis!

And it's completed! 

1) The finished lightboard, all populated and ready to go! This is easily my most aesthetically pleasing and most well thought through circuit board I've made. I'm also pretty satisfied with the fact that I've more or less never touched electronics on this level before starting the build. There are two power chains, 5+ and 12+ (or whatever I decide to hook up), and I've put 2A fuses on each power chain. My plan is to run the device with all lights active and in case the fuses burn out I'll increase the fuse rating. I'm not putting it back untested again...

I've spent the evening finishing up the lightboard (yesterday was spent on upgrading the WAV Trigger firmware) and it turned out great! Unless I've forgotten a cable or two in the logic channels it's ready to be put back into the machine. I'll probably develop the new required light code out of the machine first (on the Arduino board) so that I don't have to hunch more than necessary. :)

 The only thing I'm slightly worried about is burning out the last row of the LED-matrices, since the current limiting resistor is the same as the others. I haven't done the math for those yet, but I kind of hope that the green ones will simply be dimmer and the red ones within safe margins...

2) Green lights on the top seven rows...

3) ... and red lights on the bottom row, visualizing the higher voltage power chain.

Once it's tested and ready to go, there's only the small matter of soldering new cables to each light. It's around 60 meters of cable to cut, rig and solder.

Matrices be matricing!

1) Getting closer...

Most components are in place now, just need to connect the dots basically. Missing are the fuse boxes and the actual shift registers. The underside looks horrendeous thou, but there's basically no other way to do it with experiment cards... It works perfectly, and that's the important part. :)

2) The flip side. Ginormous resistors are ginormous... Behind them there's a ground "bridge" and one is visible in the top right as well. Soldering islands together like this is obviously not the best solution, but it works and works pretty well. "Next time" I'm building something I'll have the PCB's prefab'ed. It's cheap enough and saves a ton of time!

Lights are coming!

Quick update today.

This is the current state of the second revision of the lightboard. Much neater design, although there's been two mishaps. The first is that I accidentally ordered much too beefy resistors, so they're too big for the initial design and I've been forced to put some of them under the board. The second thing is that the LED-modules were almost twice as big as expected and will be sticking out from the board.

But it's all good, I believe.

1) Semi-populated lightboard. This time I went for a much more streamlined design, along with "seats" for the IC circuits
which will avoid a lot of pain when/if needed to be replaced. The cable connectors has since the picture was taken been adapted to be unique so that the cables "can't" be plugged in incorrectly. Unless I've made a fatal design error, this board will be a lot more stable than the old and far easier to debug, troubleshoot and correct!

74 000

74 000 video frames has been compiled into a single video master file today.
Who knew a pinball machine could have that many frames of animation... but then again, this machine is not your average run of the mill machine. It's truly one of a kind. ;)

I'll try to get started on the new lightboard this weekend. Work's been going real slow on that one so far with the flu, tour and time off needed to regain some energy. But soon I hope I'll be able to present some nice news for you all!