We can rebuild him.. make him stronger....

After being snowed under with work during the last couple of months, I have not had the time to even look at the forums, let alone give an update on my coin door circuit board.

I have removed the links for the boards as I am currently working on a much better solution that I think people will prefer.

I cannot let too much out of the bag, but it may replace a couple of other boards that most of us are using at the moment.

Will post more details as it comes to life.

Ooops

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Disclaimer: This tutorial involves soldering and the instalation of electrical components. You follow these directions at your own risk. There is a risk of bodily harm when using the tools mentioned in the tutorial. Just be careful and you should be able to avoid injury. There is a risk of burning down your home with the soldering iron. Don't leave them on and unattended.  Just be careful and don't blame me when you break something, hurt yourself, or burn down your home. Also, I make no guarantee that any of this will work for you. The tutorial is available for educational purposes and documents to the best of skills but I am only an amatuer hobbiest.
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Well I hope no one run out and tried to make my board up as I discovered a little fault in my schematic. *faceplam*
The new design is in and tested.  It is now ready to go!



The full schematic for anyone who is interested.

The circuit that the board was based on

The layout and design

The finished product

Then I came accross another little delima. There are two type of plugs that are being sold on coin doors. The board above is for this type -

If you have this type of plug, go to this page

Now if you have this type of plug, go to this page

Coin door circuit

After a question was put to the VP fourms from ironspider regarding how to wire a coin door that Darfall pointed out that my solution with just putting a microswitch on the coin door would be sending a repeated signal via the Ipac to the ROM.

It worked well enough for me at the time, but there had to be a better way.

So I went on the hunt on a how-to and came across this -

http://www.indiabix.com/electronics-circuits/555-monostable-multivibrator/

(click on the start simulation now to start it then click on the H to simulate a opening of the coin door)

So it had to be done. It took only a couple of resistors, a couple of capacitors, either a transitor or a spare ULN2803 to drive any voltage relay of 5-15 volts and its done!

Check it out here in my first vid blog.

The circuit is pretty simple for anyone who has tinkered with any electronics, but for anyone else, I have posted on the HP and VP forums.

 

Zebulon from VP Forums has been designing a power interface board for the LEDwiz that a lot of us are using in out cabinets. The LEDwiz is good for about 500 mA per output but only a few watts in totall. It is quite easy to overload an output and then kill an entire driver chip, taking out 1/4 of your outputs. This interface board will take a LEDwiz output and electrically seperate it from out LED's, Contactors, etc so all the load is powered by the interface board, no the LEDwiz.

So I got a little sample pack in the mail :D



Took me two weeks to get around to soldeing one of the high power boards up (he has a few different boards, depending on the load your going to put on it) and retro fit it into my cab to drive my Crees at 700 mA.



I disconnected the LED outputs from the terminal strips and connected them to the interface board outputs. Then installed new wires from the terminals (from the LEDwiz outputs) and wired them into the inputs on the interface board. Easy!
To give it a decent test run, I downloaded the LEDwiz software from the GGG size and used the LumArua controller to turn on all the LED outputs. An hour later I came back to see how the mosfets were coping...... they were not even warm to touch!

The LED's look awesome at 700 mA which would have killed the LEDwiz if I had of tried so nice work Zebulon. This is just what my cabinet needed.

I have been following a thread from russdx on the vpforums - here and his design of a dmd interface board. As one that has had little to no success of getting DMD's in the right spot on the 3rd monitor, this looked like a god send.

russdx was almost certain they would work with the Vishay LEE128G032B00E90  LED display but wanted to confirm. I had one of the Vishay displays from another project (dont ask :D) and asked to purchase a board to give it a go.

He was kind enough to send me his prototype board to confirm that it works with the 5 volt display for free. Here are the results

Forgive the crap video as it just does not do the display or control board justice. Will have to work out that camera and encoding software one day......

Anyway I can recommend russdx's board because the results are brilliant! Get one from russdx on the vpforums.

Had a question regarding use of the 8 channel relay boards and how to hook it up to LEDwiz.
With some help from pinballooking who had used the board before on how to use the board with a ground input rather than a positive input, I drew up a visio drawing for the job.

DeeGor from the forums picked up that I missed the shaker motor Dual H control that Wolfsoft came up with on his blog. I have done some drawings and used one of wolfsofts pics to be able to show what needs to be done. Let me know if you need more details gents.