Thursday, July 6, 2017

Fan-Tas-Tic Pinball, Part 7, Back to a LED - display!

The original Fan-Tas-Tic machine had a mechanical roulette wheel assembly, visible through a window in the middle of the playing field. For some time now I had it replaced with a 1280x720 LCD panel.

 

However, I'm not completely happy with this configuration and recently decided, the LCD panel has to go! 



Even though it worked nicely with the Raspberry PI and Mission Pinball. It wasn't flashy enough, had some large borders at the top and bottom, and the rather high resolution was completely wasted at typical playing distance. Also I underestimated the effort it takes, designing high-res video content -- which kind of got me stuck for a while.

The replacement will be a 32 x 32 LED video tile. The 5 mm pitched versions have the perfect size to cover the 6 inch playfield cut-out. To adapt the square to the circle, I designed a `pixel-grid` in Fusion 360. It is supposed to give the pixels a well defined appearance and makes sure that light from neighboring LEDs does not spill over.




I went for 1 mm wall thickness, hoping that the university laser-cutter can handle it. And it just about did!



30 minutes later I got the finished piece. In one small spot the laser didn't cut through all the way due to some irregularities in the plywood. I finished it off with an x-acto knive. The result is not perfect but I think it will do the job.

  


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