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Linking LED to playfield controlled lamp

Andy B

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Joined
Oct 6, 2014
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1,350
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Hull. England.
I have my spanking new The Big Lebowski pinball machine (thanks to Dave Bishop) and it is truly awesome - one of the best I’ve ever played in terms of shots, rules and theme.

Being a big fan of the movie I have collected various memorabilia over the years including a full set of the Pop Funko! figurines.

I want to create a custom topper using these figurines. Simple idea of mounting the 5 figurines (boxed or unboxed yet to be decided) on top of backbox and when the character mode light in the playfield is switched on (flashing when that character’s mode is available and solid when the feature has been completed) I want an LED spotlight to light up the corresponding Pop Funko! Figurine on top of the backbox.

I am thinking I should just be able to run a couple of wires from the relevant character’s light under the playfield to spotlight LED under the figure on the backbox right?

The below linked article on Pinside seems to suggest it’s that simple but just wanted to run it past you guys to make sure I’m not overlooking any potential pitfalls that might bugger the machine! And since as I will just be daisy-chaining the LED from the controlled lamp I won’t need a diode on it right?

Cheers

Andy



 

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yes. just connect the two wires of the led to the two tabs on the insert lamp, just make sure you get the polarity right. might need a resistor in series with your led too depending on the voltage of the led. we can help you work that out.

you will probably be ok with 6 wires from the back box. one for each figure =5 and one common wire for all 5 leds.


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Well that peed on my bonfire!

Looked under playfield tonight to size up the job and the LEDs are actually fixed/built in to the PCB. Lord knows what you’re meant to do if the LED dies on you.

Looks like it will just be a permanently on LED strip light under Pop Funko! characters on backbox then 🙁
 
On a game like this I would not be connecting/soldering stuff internally - it will invalidate your warranty for starters as it could damge something on the boards.

You can use light activated relays and build something independenly that is 100% seperate from the game.
 
can we have a pic of the board please, interested to see what and how theyve done it.

Not the actual board in question but here’s a photo of one of the other boards that has LEDs mounted on it. Lord knows what you have to do if one of the LEDs die?
 

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Id have to drink 10 pints of cider to bring that into focus. I cant tell what it is

It's a green PCB with surface mounted LEDs on it. Blue and yellow wires at the bottom, 4 surface mount LEDs (white squares with yellow blobs in the middle) on it.
 
Well done for downing 10 pints of Cider Peter!

On a serious note - I guess these are rgb leds or maybee even addressable rgb leds? No easy way to connect into them if they are.
 
On a serious note - I guess these are rgb leds or maybee even addressable rgb leds? No easy way to connect into them if they are.

I would expect so. It depends on how they are connected in the back box, many mods are connected there and use z connectors to stack as an easy way to connect.
 
That's the way I would do it on a WPC, hook into the row/col outputs on the driver board (there is sometimes a free header that means you don't have to use z connectors), but not sure what tech TBL is running...?
 
So the P-ROC has WPC compatibility is the sense that it has column and row lamp outputs, so assuming the TBL code uses these to send lamp signals, you could z-connector to those outputs and pickup the correct col/row for the lamp you wanted to monitor. Could you post a picture of the lamp page in the manual? That should give a better indication of how TBL manages the lamps.
 
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Looks like there is a PC power supply in the back box which has a spare 12v supply and also an arcade machine type PSU which I’m sure will also have a 12v output. I think I will tap off one of those and just have the figures constantly lit by an LED strip.

As Pickholder says I don’t really want to be making any direct connections to any boards in this machine with it being brand new.
 
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