Quoted from RatShack:The Gottlieb System 80B lamp board. I am never hand wiring a board this complex again.
wow, lot of work 
So this is a Gottlieb driver Board without Edge Connectors, or do you do a 'conversion' here .. ?
(Topic ID: 239045)
Quoted from lucky1:I implemented a routine to send the raw frame data of pinmame to my PIN2DMD. That way there is only the USB transfer to be handled by the Pi and the frame calculation is done by pin2dmd
Where is this code? I'll happily switch to pin2dmd.
Quoted from bontango:wow, lot of work
So this is a Gottlieb driver Board without Edge Connectors, or do you do a 'conversion' here .. ?
Playfield harness edge connectors are replaced with 0.156" Molex header connectors, same pinout.
Corpus Christi, TX
1 week later
I'm amazed by what you archieved by this !!
In my case, I would like to revive a Big Guns pinball that I bought with missing System11A CPU board, audio board and auxiliary power driver unit board. Alphanumeric display board is also missing.
Power supply and the rest of the components are fine, but I have no clue if are working although they look fine (no burned things).
I'm planning to get a Rottendog alplhanumeric board for the display, but I wonder if I can put back to life the pinball with your board without very big difficulties? I'm a newbie with real pinballs but an enthusiast in tinkering things, but I'm scared if this project is too much for me. If I'm capable of build the board, it would be somehow plug and play? (Once I get the Lisy_Mini and arduino stuff done.)
I'm really excited in the idea of put this pinball in play again!!
Solingen
Quoted from buskimanu:but I'm scared if this project is too much for me.
If you're unsure whether your electronic skills are good enough to populate the boards then I'd recommend to wait for the APC 3.0.
As already mentioned it will have the Pi already on board and I'm also working on a version which can have most of the parts populated by the chinese board manufacturer.
Alas, this is going to require some patience as I still have to complete the layout and assign the manufacturer's component numbers. Then some SW rework is necessary to change the communication to I2C and implement a settings menu for the Lisy part as there won't be any DIP switches on the APC board. This is going to require also some work from my Lisy partner who is currently rather busy with other Lisy related issues.
When all this is done I'm going to order some boards to test them and if everything works I can release the design.
So in the end we're probably talking about 3 to 6 month depending on how many time we can spare for this project.
After that you'd still need an auxiliary power driver board and in order to use PinMame without a sound board you'd have to extract the Big Guns sounds from PinMame and put them on the SD-card as described here:
https://github.com/AmokSolderer/APC/blob/master/DOC/PinMame.md
Quoted from AmokSolderer:If you're unsure whether your electronic skills are good enough to populate the boards then I'd recommend to wait for the APC 3.0.
As already mentioned it will have the Pi already on board and I'm also working on a version which can have most of the parts populated by the chinese board manufacturer.
Alas, this is going to require some patience as I still have to complete the layout and assign the manufacturer's component numbers. Then some SW rework is necessary to change the communication to I2C and implement a settings menu for the Lisy part as there won't be any DIP switches on the APC board. This is going to require also some work from my Lisy partner who is currently rather busy with other Lisy related issues.
When all this is done I'm going to order some boards to test them and if everything works I can release the design.
So in the end we're probably talking about 3 to 6 month depending on how many time we can spare for this project.
After that you'd still need an auxiliary power driver board and in order to use PinMame without a sound board you'd have to extract the Big Guns sounds from PinMame and put them on the SD-card as described here:
https://github.com/AmokSolderer/APC/blob/master/DOC/PinMame.md
This sounds great!
I'm already ordering the alphanumeric and auxiliary board and start extracting sounds with pinmame until we wait for the APC 3.0 release to be ready, I can't wait !! 
1 month later
hi everyone, I have a complete playfield from a (Revenge From Mars) that I would like to customize with MPF, is it possible to buy a complete board?
thank you very much.
They aren't hard to build(ignore my travails, I was the victim of my own hair trigger choices). I haven't heard of anyone selling completed boards.
Most of the parts are even DIP. So quite straightforward to solder. Only the amp is SMD but you do not have to populate if that frightens you. It is not very hard either. With MPF you can either use the APC sound engine (for existing sounds off a SD card) or just the sound card of your PC with some external amp.
Jan
Well, there are lots of smd stuff on the driver side, too. But none of it is particularly bad. I even use the same solder tip for smd.
1 week later
The SMD version of the 3.0 hardware is ready.
Alas, during the ordering process I had to learn that the SOIC version of the IC I used most on the board has run out of stock at JLCPCB. They still have it in TSSOP, but while SOIC can still be soldered by hand quite well, this is much more difficult with TSSOP. So in the end it would mean that most people could not service their board in case of a defect.
That was not my intention, so I just ordered 5 boards and I now have to solder the missing ICs by hand. Let's hope they're back in stock soon as this somehow betrays the idea of easing the assembly by letting the manufacturer do the job.
But there's also good news, as the price for the SMD components and the assembly fee is below 10€ per board, which is a very good price IMHO.
Quoted from AmokSolderer:The SMD version of the 3.0 hardware is ready.
Alas, during the ordering process I had to learn that the SOIC version of the IC I used most on the board has run out of stock at JLCPCB. They still have it in TSSOP, but while SOIC can still be soldered by hand quite well, this is much more difficult with TSSOP. So in the end it would mean that most people could not service their board in case of a defect.
That was not my intention, so I just ordered 5 boards and I now have to solder the missing ICs by hand. Let's hope they're back in stock soon as this somehow betrays the idea of easing the assembly by letting the manufacturer do the job.
But there's also good news, as the price for the SMD components and the assembly fee is below 10€ per board, which is a very good price IMHO.
Will the code change significantly between the older version and 3.0?
Quoted from ThatOneDude:Will the code change significantly between the older version and 3.0?
No, the same code will run on all HW versions. This is also valid for future updates and bugfixes.
Of course the 3.0 specific features will only work with this HW, but the older HW will still work and just ignore those.
One example: if you look into the 0.14 code you'll find the new 'Connect Type' setting. This determines whether the APC communicates via 'USB' or 'OnBoard' (I2C). Of course the latter requires a Pi on board and will therefore only work with the new HW, but with 'USB' selected the old HW will work as before.
Should we add I2C support for APC in MPF as well? I guess that the protocol would be the same or is that a different protocol?
Jan
Quoted from jabdoa:I guess that the protocol would be the same or is that a different protocol?
The protocol is the same.
Quoted from jabdoa:Should we add I2C support for APC in MPF as well?
This might be a question for Ralf, because if we let Lisy run MPF then it would also have to control the interface. That would mean MPF wouldn't have to care about it.
But to be honest I'm not aware of the pros and cons of running MPF independently or under Lisy control.
Don't know if Ralf is following here, so I raised this question in the APC 3.0 dev thread.
BTW any updates from your projects?
ThatOneDude
RatShack
Kneissl
and all the others. I'm curious how your projects are evolving.
We have created a space for own APC projects.
https://www.flippertreff.de/start/forum/forum/189-eigene-apc-projekte/
It's in the german forum, but you can also use it in english. So if you like you could even start your own thread to document your project, ask questions and so on. This is also meant for people thinking about starting an own APC project to become an idea what problems might come up and how they can be solved.
Of course you'd probably get more feedback if you'd start such a thread here in Pinside.
Quoted from AmokSolderer:BTW any updates from your projects?
Well, my life is hectic right now. Had a niece move in with us, half the state is thick with wildfire smoke and most of my attention has been on getting some games repaired and out of the door to either be sold or brought to an arcade. So, I haven't made much progress since I last checked in. The other project I was helping on is progressing. She's getting the artwork done.
I actually have another opportunity to use the APC. My homebrew project is waiting on art, but I have the opportunity to buy a Strange Science populated playfield. I haven't got a chance to see it yet, but it appears to be complete. My thought was to wire it into an APC and write new rules in MPF while I wait for art on my other projects.
Progress on my machine has been slow, but steady. This summer was just too hot at my workbench, and with no shows this year there's no deadline for motivation. After wiring up that driver board I decided to work on anything but boards for awhile!
Started mounting PCBs on the control panel a few weeks ago. Working on GTB System 1 support soon.
Thanks for the updates.
Sometimes I need to be reminded why I'm bothering with the dark sides of a public project (documentation and so on) and then it always helps to see that people are actually using it. Unfortunately (but understandably) people tend to keep quiet if things are going well, so most of the guys I get to know have questions or problems. But of course I'd also be interested in those cases where it just works fine.
Quoted from ThatOneDude:My thought was to wire it into an APC and write new rules in MPF while I wait for art on my other projects.
If you don't want to use the WPC power driver board, you could theoretically wire your playfield to the APC, but there're some differences that you have to take care about.
From the back of my head I remember that the switches are driven with 12V in WPC instead of 5V, so the switch part needs to be changed.
Not sure about the lamp voltage, but this shouldn't be a big deal as the APCs lamp circuit still has some voltage margin.
Solenoids should work, but you'd probably need the solenoid expander board to be able to drive more than 24 solenoids.
And there're some additional WPC features like the GI SCRs that have to be added by an extra board which could then be connected to the HW_extension interface.
This is just what I remember at the moment, but there might be more differences.
Quoted from RatShack:After wiring up that driver board I decided to work on anything but boards for awhile!
Yeah, these wires look like a lot of work and prone to all kinds of errors. That's when I like my etching machine.
Do you plan to do real PCBs after your prototype phase?
Quoted from AmokSolderer:If you don't want to use the WPC power driver board, you could theoretically wire your playfield to the APC, but there're some differences that you have to take care about.
Strange Science is a pre-WPC Bally system. It has an odd, direct drive lamp setup, but the switch matrix looks normal(I haven't actually got to dig into it). I'm hoping to go take a look this weekend and see if it's worth saving.
Quoted from AmokSolderer:Oh, sorry I somehow confused Strange Science with Scared Stiff.
Strange Science is from the generation that Bally built shortly before they were bought by Williams, right?
No problem. You were correct in that I was previously thinking of doing a 1 off Scared Stiff based on APC. However, that machine is likely to be delayed, as I have an original SS coming in from Italy. The parts I collected will likely be used to do a restoration on it. If the parts I have left are good enough, I would still like to do the pinmame->APC work.
I was originally doing a custom Stranger Things machine, but the Stern version has frankly killed a lot of my momentum. And my artist is knee deep in college work. :/
So, if I were to switch to Strange Science, I
a) don't need to come up with the original artwork
b) don't need the extra solenoids, etc, that a WPC would require
Quoted from AmokSolderer:Yeah, these wires look like a lot of work and prone to all kinds of errors. That's when I like my etching machine.
Do you plan to do real PCBs after your prototype phase?
Yes, eventually. Any future boards that are moderately complex (DE lamp + solenoid) will be prototyped using PCBs from the start.
Praha
Quoted from AmokSolderer:Thanks for the updates.
Sometimes I need to be reminded why I'm bothering with the dark sides of a public project (documentation and so on) and then it always helps to see that people are actually using it. Unfortunately (but understandably) people tend to keep quiet if things are going well, so most of the guys I get to know have questions or problems. But of course I'd also be interested in those cases where it just works fine.
AmokSolderer it makes a huge difference!
I'm in a process of making my own pinball controller (just based on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi for DMD) and projects like yours are something that keeps me going forward. It means that my goal is actually achievable and it's also huge source of knowledge that I can use when I get stuck (it's my first electronics project)
Keep up the good work. I will definitely add APC boards to my next JLCPCB order (I'm just in a process of restoring my F-14 Tomcat ).
Thanks for the feedback
Quoted from Isac:I will definitely add APC boards to my next JLCPCB order
Alas, there's still no SOIC variant of the 74HCT273 available at JLCPCB and also LCSC (their shop) doesn't offer any. That makes me wonder whether all the work of making an SMD version of the APC was in vain.
So, I am picking up a Stern Whitestar system tomorrow. It would be a convenient way to rectify and fuse the power for my system. Of course, the power i/o board in the Whitestar has its own driver section, which i think is driven by data bus of sorts. Piecing together some docs from the P-ROC and the partial schematics i have, it looks like there are 8 data lines and 7 enable lines. Think it would make sense to be able to drive that from the expansion bus?
Quoted from ThatOneDude:Think it would make sense to be able to drive that from the expansion bus?
I don't have any Whitestar schematics at hand, but if the interface is 5V than it shouldn't be a big deal. The 8 data lines are already available at the expansion bus and you could use something like a 74HCT138 to generate up to 8 enable signals from the 4 select signals of the expansion bus.
Quoted from LovelyCoCoNuts:I am still interested. Please let me know when a board is available
I'm sorry, but it looks like it's still going to take a while for the 3.0 boards to be released. This is not due to HW issues, because apart from 1 forgotten resistor 
the 3.0 board is doing a great job in my Black Knight.
The first problem is that the Lisy maintainer is currently suffering from FPGA-fever. On lisy.dev you can see that he's building all kinds of FPGA based replacement boards. Of course this is great for Gottlieb users, but it also means that the Lisy development for APC is stuck at the moment.
As some SW changes in Lisy are necessary to completely test the on board Raspi of the APC 3.0, this also means that I'm not able to complete the 3.0 testing at the moment.
The second problem is that LCSC has changed the status of the SOIC version of the 74HCT273 to discontinued which probably means I have to find some kind of replacement and do the necessary layout changes.
However, apart from the Raspi being on board, a bit more functionality on the HW extensions interface and a new layout to enable the board being populated by the manufacturer, the 2.4 board has the same features. So if you don't want to use Lisy and you're willing (and able) to do the soldering you could still ask whether someone has a V2.4 board left for sale.
I've done some investigation, and this is my findings so far: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/question-about-whitestar-sam-mpu-to-power-i-o-#post-5887009
So, practical upshot:
There are 8 data lines(Dx) and 4 address lines(Ax). The first three address lines(A0-A2) are fed into 2 demuxs as address lines. A3 is used as an enable signal for the demuxs, giving us a total of 16 possible 8 bit banks(several of which aren't used and are disconnected on the 2nd demux). There are two other important signals, RESET and IOSTB(IO Strobe). IOSTB is used to indicated that the current address on A0-A2 is viable(not an indeterminate value during an MPU reset or the like).
So, my idea is to have an Arduino sitting on the expansion bus. Once enabled, it will watch the blanking line to kill things, and put the board into reset if need be. Then, it will watch for commands to fire a solenoid. I could add lamps, too. I'm on the fence, but if I'm already controlling solenoids, might as well have all normal output getting caught and sent here.
If I am not using it for lamps, I'll just have it do the lamp polling that needs to happen for the watchdog.
The question I have is speed. I'm thinking that plugging in a Teensy will obviate that concern. I see that there is a 600Mhz Teensy now. It should be 3.3v. I may have to level shift the output.
It's not that it offers anything better. I decided to use it to rectify and fuse the stern transformer I'm using, but I already have to poll the lamp matrix to keep the watchdog chip from resetting. If I have to drive that anyway, why not use it for the other drivers? I was planning to build a simple rectifier board originally, but i worry about making a mistake and frying something. Or worse, starting a fire.
If i get this working, it also expands the possible uses of the APC to also drive Whitestar and SAM Stern machines. And, for homebrew games, you could run two lamp matrices and a second bank of solenoids.
I have recently embarked on the conversion of a Flash! pinball machine to a custom build. Ironically I had decided a similar path as APC, originally opting to design my own board utilizing a DUE as the controller. My first pass was to build one to interface to the 40 pin interboard connector and utilize the existing high power components and the PIAs. After finding this project, I've decided to go with replacing the whole set. I have a few questions on the project.
1) How is the DUE protected from 5v? Is it only via the voltage divider created by the 4.7k resistors (R77-R85) and the 18K R network on the switch driver schematic? That looks like it should drop things to 3.96v
2) Are there alternatives to SN74BCT760N? That part runs $5 each. I have been searching, but so far see nothing pin-compatible. What is the unique property of this part? Why wouldn't other try-stateable buffers suffice? Is it the open collector nature?
3) Which PCB fab do folks recommend (USA)? I was considering JLB or PCBWay. Alternatively, does anyone have a spare board to sell?
4) Has anyone used this to control Neopixels? Perhaps via the SPI interface earmarked for the SD Card. I would be USB connected to a PC, so no need for an SDCard.
Thanks for all of your hard work designing and prototyping the PCB and MPF driver.
Question 5). Resistor R88 is labeled as 47k ohm on the schematic and BOM description. However BOM part number is for a 4.7K ohm resistor. I assume that the schematic and description are correct and it should be 47k.
RE: #3 - I use JLB. Fast and priced well. I ordered 5x boards when I did mine. I think I have 1 that is mostly unpopulated(I just started adding some of the extra components to it with the expectation that I will eventually finish it). I had to switch to rebuilding some machines, so I'll have to dig it up and find out how far I went.
#4 - The OP made a board to control neopixels: https://github.com/AmokSolderer/APC/tree/master/DOC/Hardware/APC_LED_exp
Oh, that's interesting. Does that plug into the main APC board?
I just placed the order for components from Mouser. Total cost is around $105 for parts.
I'll send the Gerber files over to JLB and see what I get back. How much did JLB cost you?
Quoted from aaronhmorris:Does that plug into the main APC board?
Yes. If you look back through the discussion, he mentions how it works. The .ino file is also there in the github repo. I'm currently building an interface to control Stern Whitestar/SAM power I/O driver boards.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:How much did JLB cost you?
I misspoke. I used JLCPCB. Is that what you meant?
I think it was about $35 for the bare boards. I haven't tried to price the new surface mount version.
Right - JLCPCB. I ordered mine last night. Total of $37 with faster shipping. I guess I need to improve my soldering skills for a job this big. Wish we could get the BOM cost down a bit.
JLCPCB is advertising 5x 100x100 boards for $2 plus shipping! Wow PCBs are cheap now.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:Wish we could get the BOM cost down a bit.
The biggest savings would be to wait until JCLPCB gets the missing parts in stock again. Then, you could get all of the SMD work done for you for cheap. Other than that, I was able to drop the price by a few bucks by getting 4 sets of parts ordered at once.
Quoted from ThatOneDude:The question I have is speed.
From the Apollo 13 manual I just downloaded it looks like this is just some power driver board similar to WPC. Therefore I don't think speed will be an issue as the control signals for lamps, solenoids and so on are usually in the milliseconds and this watchdog circuit has a default of 150ms.
That means there're only two restrictions when using the HW_ext bus of the APC to drive it. You already pointed out the first one: for full access you'd need four address lines and a strobe which makes 5 signals, but the HW_ext interface only features 4. When I remember right you don't want to use the display port of the APC, which means you could use the segment outputs to control the stern board. On the upside this will give you 32 additional select lines, but on the downside it means you wouldn't be able to just use the WriteToHwExt command. Instead you'd have to change the HW_driver on APC.ino to support the addressing via the display signals.
The second restriction is that the stern board features a bi-directional bus, but the bus of the APC is just mono-directional. However, from what I can see from my quite blurred schematics, this is not a big restriction as these bi-directional functionality just handles some AUX input stuff.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:I have recently embarked on the conversion of a Flash! pinball machine to a custom build.
Welcome to our thread. We have a guy in the german forum who is also customizing his Flash!
https://www.flippertreff.de/start/forum/topic/11522-flash-wiederbelebung/
I don't know if some internet translator could be useful here, but the pictures alone might be interesting, too.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:1) How is the DUE protected from 5v? Is it only via the voltage divider created by the 4.7k resistors (R77-R85) and the 18K R network on the switch driver schematic? That looks like it should drop things to 3.96v
This is true if you'd drive the Sw_Sense signals with 5V, but here they're pulled up by RR7 leading to 5V*18K/27.4K = 3.28V.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:What is the unique property of this part? Why wouldn't other try-stateable buffers suffice? Is it the open collector nature?
Exactly, as the pullup of the Sw_Sense lines must be done exclusively by RR7 we're just allowed to pull them down by an open-collector driver.
Quoted from aaronhmorris:Question 5). Resistor R88 is labeled as 47k ohm on the schematic and BOM description. However BOM part number is for a 4.7K ohm resistor. I assume that the schematic and description are correct and it should be 47k.
Both will work. I'm going to correct the BOM part number to 47K just to save some current and prevent global warming 
Quoted from ThatOneDude:The biggest savings would be to wait until JCLPCB gets the missing parts in stock again.
As the parts have been set to 'discontinued' I doubt they'll be restocked. I probably have to change the footprint to TSSOP ...
Quoted from AmokSolderer:Instead you'd have to change the HW_driver on APC.ino to support the addressing via the display signals.
My plan is a bit simpler. I'm not going to directly drive the i/o bus. Instead, I'm going to send it 2 bytes of data along with the select line. My teensy will catch the 2 bytes, interpret the bottom bits of the first as the address lines and the second as data and pass those signals to the stern board. It will also use the blanking signal to force a reset of the i/o board.
I'm completely ignoring the bi directional part of the i/o bus. Rather than alter the hw_ext bus. I would be more inclined to have the teensy catch that and use SPI or I2C to feed that data back to the arduino. But so far, i haven't found an example of the board where the aux_in is even populated, so I suspect that leaving this capability out won't affect much.
Quoted from AmokSolderer:This is also possible and you don't even need a Teensy for that - two 8 bit latches should do the job.
I'll use a Teensy for 2 reasons:
1) I don't have any latches in my box, but I do have a spare Teensy
2) I may need to do some more complex work. The I/O board also has a watchdog chip on it, and if someone opts to use the lamps on the APC board, there still has to be a lamp strobe. The Teensy can do this in the background, even in the case that the I/O board is used for nothing but feeding voltages to the APC.
Keep in mind that the APC 2.x versions have a logic level of 5V at the data and 3.3V at the select lines of the Hw_ext interface. This works well with HCT logic, but the Teensy might not like it.
This is resolved with the APC 3.0 BTW which has 5V at all Hw_ext pins.
3 weeks later
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