I mentioned in my last post that my mods take up most of my time, but it's paying for my hobby. 3rd wonkavator just sold and not only paid for the P3-roc, PD-16 and SW-16, but I have enough left to pickup a PD-LED now and start messing with RGB light shows when I get back into it. The lighting is probably what I'm most excited for. After seeing Scott Danesi use that light show software, I wanna start messing with it
http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/tools/showcreator/index.html
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Monday, August 26, 2019
What's going on?
My mod business has really taken off. I keep saying I need to just pause so I can get other stuff done, but it's so hard to say no to money. One thing I did manage to fabricate was an electric leg leveler. Jack said on stream a few months ago "wouldn't be awesome to have legs that were electric?", so I was like "challenge accepted". Granted they aren't auto-leveling (yet), I did manage to build a working solution.. I am working with someone to make that second part a reality. If you want to see video, here's Jack at my house playing wonka showing them off:
https://youtu.be/fdcJ8ydXigY?t=5348
So I took the plunge, bought a PROC. If Hugh is reading this, I didn't pay full price. So I've had a PROC search term on ebay for a while now.. Some boards came up this morning.. some guy bought boards with the intent on making a homebrew, but he gave up.. Brand new boards never used. He also had a make offer button, so I of course made one. Well he accepted without offering a counter-offer. I got a P3-ROC and PD-16 (main board and 16 coil driverboard) for $160 (it retails for $260) so I'm already $100 off. He also had a SW-16 (16 switch inputs) for $27 ($45 retail) but didn't bother making an offer, just added it to my cart. So for $200 I have everything I need to get a game started-ish (I know I'll need at least another switch board, and an LED driver when I get to light shows), and I'll probably spend the $90 on the power supply just to ensure I don't blow up any boards.
So why the decision to go PROC and not continue with OPP? I think pretty much every person that has tried out OPP has realized it has it's limitations. It can't do video, I think one user complained about the lack of speed? I will have to say considering how cheap Hugh made his boards it's really incredible what he was able to achieve and it's still very usable if your game doesn't require any flashy graphics or animated GI light shows. In fact I still think there's a market for just a dumb board that requires no PC for laying out whitewood (which is sort of what OPP started as with a single chip). Just a 4-coil driverboard that takes in 48v, and drives a coil safely. One board would be flippers only (so it would fire full power then PWM at some default rate), and one board would be full on as long as the switch is activated (for things like ball troughs, slings, pop bumpers, VUKs). Perhaps that board has some logic too that keeps it full on for 2 seconds but shuts off if it doesn't deactivate (so coils don't burn up).
So what's the plan? Well I'm not getting to any homebrew until next year for sure. I also took the plunge and started an intro to electronics class at the same college I got my degree at. My work has started to take goals seriously, and I put that down at the beginning of the year so I pretty much had to enroll otherwise face the consequences of not getting my full end of year bonus. I'm actually happy I'm doing it. While I know enough about electronics to not be dangerous, I really want to learn how everything works. This class is intended to help me at work, but clearly this will come in handy in my pinball hobby.
https://youtu.be/fdcJ8ydXigY?t=5348
So I took the plunge, bought a PROC. If Hugh is reading this, I didn't pay full price. So I've had a PROC search term on ebay for a while now.. Some boards came up this morning.. some guy bought boards with the intent on making a homebrew, but he gave up.. Brand new boards never used. He also had a make offer button, so I of course made one. Well he accepted without offering a counter-offer. I got a P3-ROC and PD-16 (main board and 16 coil driverboard) for $160 (it retails for $260) so I'm already $100 off. He also had a SW-16 (16 switch inputs) for $27 ($45 retail) but didn't bother making an offer, just added it to my cart. So for $200 I have everything I need to get a game started-ish (I know I'll need at least another switch board, and an LED driver when I get to light shows), and I'll probably spend the $90 on the power supply just to ensure I don't blow up any boards.
So why the decision to go PROC and not continue with OPP? I think pretty much every person that has tried out OPP has realized it has it's limitations. It can't do video, I think one user complained about the lack of speed? I will have to say considering how cheap Hugh made his boards it's really incredible what he was able to achieve and it's still very usable if your game doesn't require any flashy graphics or animated GI light shows. In fact I still think there's a market for just a dumb board that requires no PC for laying out whitewood (which is sort of what OPP started as with a single chip). Just a 4-coil driverboard that takes in 48v, and drives a coil safely. One board would be flippers only (so it would fire full power then PWM at some default rate), and one board would be full on as long as the switch is activated (for things like ball troughs, slings, pop bumpers, VUKs). Perhaps that board has some logic too that keeps it full on for 2 seconds but shuts off if it doesn't deactivate (so coils don't burn up).
So what's the plan? Well I'm not getting to any homebrew until next year for sure. I also took the plunge and started an intro to electronics class at the same college I got my degree at. My work has started to take goals seriously, and I put that down at the beginning of the year so I pretty much had to enroll otherwise face the consequences of not getting my full end of year bonus. I'm actually happy I'm doing it. While I know enough about electronics to not be dangerous, I really want to learn how everything works. This class is intended to help me at work, but clearly this will come in handy in my pinball hobby.
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