Another week of working on the Pinball machine! Heres some (mostly visual) updates. Enjoy!
Nothing really changed here recently but since so far I didn’t really show this, here some pictures of the various solenoids that are driving the playing field action. (Including a rather creative solution for a missing pop bumper switch plastic)
Here some control electronics overview:
“Main control” controls the overall game logic (implemented in D) and sends commands via SPI to the other modules including the display modules (see below). Most flatband cables are SPI (incl. SS cables), the thick wires are mostly for solenoids and other higher-power consumers. I recon its far from ideal to put them together like this, but thanks to CRC and frequent resending, so far I had no practical problems with data loss (the longer cable towards the display is actually shielded).
The display boards extract bitmap information via SPI and pass on the part of the frame they are not responsible for to the next module. After a day of testing and fine-tuning timing and line termination, this now actually can be controlled by the main control board to display around 30 frames per second. There is still some flickering going on as I did not manage yet to automatically phase-align the LED matrix switching with the SPI “framerate”, maybe something for next time.
Some playing field updates. Last time we had already seen the LED stripe in action. New is in particular the Millenium Falcon, a repainted lamp from the same series as the death star.
The “stay on target” runlight from the back. In a way the 328p is certainly overkill, however for me that was the easier & more flexible solution compared to a 555 or similar.
Last, but certainly not least, we now finally have proper legs and aluminum borders 😀
