I've been thinking of getting one for my Avatar LE but haven't pulled the trigger yet. I hate being on a wait list, if a big ticket item like this isn't in stock I don't buy. Good idea for a club Matt.

As long as I can join.

If we could attach XML files, this thread would be a very convenient way to share settings. Hopefully, we can keep it focused on settings and use the other thread for sales issues.

Really?!? I've never been able to make use of anything that high, but you have me intrigued. I'm going to try it on my RBION as soon as I get some spare time.

My Tron Pro just looks so beautiful with the LED OCD, makes all the difference in the world. I prefer the insert lighting over the LE now too.

I have Herg's board on a Stern, WMS, and DE. Who can beat me???!!!

Herg is a great dude with a killer product. Plus his RBION is worth, like, $12,000.

FS: RBION Mudflaps Edition

Okay, now it's $16,000.

On topic, I haven't messed with any of my settings. They all looked fantastic out of the box.

Lazy.

You could probably mess with the settings on your WOZ.

OHHH NNOOOOO, NEVER MIND!! Too soon?

Oh no you didn't. Time for another deployment for you.

resized_piseed-off-harry-meme-generator-voldemort-you-have-no-parents-oh-no-you-didn-t-d35d30.jpg

GI and LED OCD on STTNG, LED OCD on Jackbot, LED OCD on Metallica.

STTNG and Funhouse both with both boards. I agree that as more people see these things in action, demand will rise.

I put this on my NASCAR and twister agree look good right out of the box

Question, I have Avatar LE so right out of the box will the OCD board mimic the stock fade pattern of the inserts for my game or will I have to mess with it.

At worst we could paste screenshots of settings. ST pro needs a few different settings across the playfield. Top lanes need a very square wave for super fast flashing, lock targets the same. Then put a nice smooth ramp on the shields and beeootifull!

And yes, Tron SOOTB is perfect!

I'm not part of this club yet but want to be very badly! I'm waiting for the next batch of Williams LED OCD boards for one of my machines.

Can we modify the charter of this club to include GI OCD or should we start a new club?

I installed a GI OCD in my STTNG over the weekend and all I can say is WOW. What a professional product!

Id be interested to know if anyone had tried an OCD on a Capcom game? Id love to put LED's in my Breakshot inserts but it is impossible due to the horrible flicker due to the inability to turn off dimming.

has price come down on these yet? I have not paid attention but seemed like originally I thought they were pricey for what they do.

What?! No way. This is the best value mod around!

The price will probably never come down, they're not cheap to make, this isn't mass commodity hardware from a big company. If you don't want to spend that much then don't, but boy was I glad I did the first time I fired up Tron after installing it. Simply beautiful, wouldn't go back.

Big thumbs up to herg.

Add to that the fact that people are lined up waiting to buy them as soon as Herg can get them out. There is no reason to expect a price drop. I am anxiously waiting for the chance to buy my fifth one.

These are good enough to be a must buy for any pin that is getting LEDs.

OK, sounds like I should bite the bullet and buy one to try it out???

Unfortunately most of my games already have premium LEDs and I have seen others say it does not work as well with premiums as it does the cheapos?

Not that I'm aware of. I've been curious about it for a long time, but lack of time to work on it, limited access to Capcom games, and limited demand have prevented me from starting work on it. The final straw is that it would take two OCD boards since there are two matrices in Capcom games.

It also depends on how picky you are. Even though I picked the defaults to make them the best compromise for all games that I could, I still end up tweaking nearly every game I get. Others tell me that they're perfect out of the box. Even more confusing is that when I owned HS2, I had a bunch of custom settings. My brother's HS2, with the same brand and colors of LEDs, I ended up staying with the defaults after tweaking on it for about 15 minutes.

What I usually end up doing is set it to something that looks close, play a while, tweak a little more, then ask my wife to look at it. Her eyes are more sensitive than mine, so if it passes her test, I call it done.

I have one in my spiderman with ghostbusters. Looks good.

That's true, but I think you can tweak the settings and get them looking good. The software gives you a lot of flexibility to control how it lights each lamp.

What is the price for the B/W one and how long does it take to get one if I get on the list?

$150, dunno.

There's not really a waiting list any longer. You can sign up for notifications via the website. Also, the ETA for new stock is updated on the website.

I'm going to try to get around to trying it this evening.

I tried a delay setting of 5 on my RBION last night, and for me, I think it's too high. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that a blinking continent insert was just barely pulsing, and you had to pay fairly close attention to tell between that and a fully lit one.

It could be dependent on the type of LEDs as well, but for my preference, in my machine, I wouldn't set it that high.

Cool!

I installed the GI-OCD in my STTNG last weekend and here is my mini review:

1) This is a quality product. You would never guess by looking at the quality of the board and inlcuded hardware and cables that this was not produced by a major corporation. First class all the way and justifies the price to me. Producing fist class quality boards and cables is not cheap in the quantities that Herg is making them.

NOTE: The GI-OCD CANNOT handle controlling a machine with incandescent bulbs installed on any GI string. Since the board takes over control of all GI strings, you must have almost all of your GI bulbs swapped out for LEDs before installing. A few incandescents here and there is not a problem.

2) Physical installation is a snap. Mount the board to the side of your backbox, install a ground wire, patch in a ribbon cable and the connections to the GI power and output connectors and plug in the USB cable and route it to the coin door. All cables, screws, Z adapters, etc INCLUDED. The cables were perfect length and allowed me to neatly tuck the bulk of them down into the hole leading to the cabinet. Looks very neat!

3) The software installation and operation is pretty straight forward. You need to install .net and a driver before installing the GI-OCD software but if you follow the steps on Herg's website, you will figure it out. No support for Mac so I had to dig out an ancient Windows machine to set this up. Operation of the software is pretty straight forward for a techie but there are some specific steps that may trip up the less computer savvy. The software functions perfectly, allows you to get the job done, it just doesn't have the commercial look and feel. This is the only place you feel that this product wasn't made by a multi-million dollar company (no offense Herg) but rather an engineer.

4) STTNG makes significant use of GI dimming during game play. The shield inserts are on a GI string and dim when you are under attack and brighten as you recharge the shields. The back box and GI dims at various points in the game. The standard Williams/Bally GI circuit DOES NOT dim LEDs well AT ALL. Additionally, the layout and color of the shield inserts basically require the use of Comet Cyan LEDs or suffer with very dim incandescents. GI-OCD allows perfect dimming for LEDs to solve all these problems.

5) The person that installed the LEDs in my machine used first generation LEDS for the whole GI. This made them look a little dim compared to other machines in my lineup. Using GI-OCD, I was able to overdrive them to come up to normal brightness! So technically, you could use 29 cent LEDs to light your GI! Time will tell if the lifespan of the LEDs will be impacted but when they blow out, I can replace them with modern LEDs and lower the brightness of the string they are installed in!

6) GI-OCD has a backbox dimming feature that is GREAT for reducing/eliminating glare on your playfield glass. You configure the "Active" setting separate from the normal setting and when the GI-OCD detects solenoid activity, it enables the Active profile for the strings you select. This, in combination with a DMD glare guard eliminates ALL reflections from the playfield glass, basically providing the benefits of Invisiglass for 1/2 the price!

Now I don't think GI-OCD is mandatory for ALL machines as some just don't make much use of dimming the GI. But if want LEDs in you GI and your machine dims GI during a game OR you want to turn off the backbox GI during game play, you just can't go wrong with this board!

Any chance you could post a video to YouTube of how your STTNG looks with this mod in action? I'm really curious to see how this looks & debating if I should install on mine

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before but I just installed my new led ocd board in my TSPP. The tv modes on the sign were noticeably dimmer. I had to manually add them into the csv file in order to change them back to 100%. The lights are the entire 10th row:
73,Duffman TV
74,Homers Day TV
75,Willies Woes TV
76,Wiggum VS Snake TV
77,Barts Day TV
78,Krusty's Last Stand TV
79,Stop The Monorail TV
80,Alien Invasion TV

Thanks for the heads-up. I hadn't caught that those TSPP inserts were missing from the file when someone sent it to me. I just updated the archive on the website, so they will be included from now on.

I have an LED OCD in my LOTR and it makes a huge difference. I a different ramp profile for each brand/type of LED I have in the machine. I had cointaker premium non-ghosting supers in it when I put the OCD in it and have been slowing swapping those out with regular (ghosting) premium supers because I found that they light cleanly at around 18% power whereas the non-ghosting LEDs flicker badly below 40% power. That little bit of extra range makes the lighting effects much smoother. Has anyone found a good quality LED that has a larger range and behaves better at the low end?

Yep I was just going through the same process tonight. I used the LED OCD software to light every lamp at 20%, and everything but the "premium" bulbs lit up. Made it easy to identify and replace 'em. Now my fades are a lot smoother.

By the way, I never understood what the "activity" setting on the GI OCD software was for, so I didn't use it, but after reading Herg's explanation, tonight I played around with it and figured out a config I really like:

First of all, I will admit that I overdrive the GI on the playfield by running it at 85. I just love how shiny everything looks with that level of illumination. Some of the LEDs get kind of hot, but I don't think I'm hurting anything -- I accidentally left it on overnight once and nothing melted, singed, or burned out.

Anyway, the "Activity" setting at least lets me minimize the amount of time I'm overdriving these bulbs. I set the activity timeout to about 2.5 minutes, and I set the playfield GI strings and the shields GI string to go dim when there's no activity. I think I put it to about 15 or 20. For the two GI strings behind the translite, I did the opposite -- they go bright (but not overdriven like the playfield) when there's no activity, and then they're configured to dim once a game starts, which along with my invisiglass totally eliminates any glare.

It's a cool effect -- when you press the start button to start a game, GI OCD (noticing the trough kicker has fired) dims the back glass and cranks up the playfield GI. Looks just awesome.

Best. Mod. Ever!

Any "extra" stuff in the bulbs will make it harder for the OCD to control the brightness because it will have less direct control.

If you want to stick with Cointaker, I'd recommend trying the regular "Frosted" or "Super":
http://shop.cointaker.com/category.sc;jsessionid=80DCBBAB7FFDD906B2D4D40D9CCE7CCD.m1plqscsfapp05?categoryId=6
http://shop.cointaker.com/category.sc;jsessionid=80DCBBAB7FFDD906B2D4D40D9CCE7CCD.m1plqscsfapp05?categoryId=60

I prefer to get most of my bulbs from Comet. 90% of what I used is the 5050 SMD Frosted:
http://www.cometpinball.com/product-p/1smd5050.htm

If you need more brightness, 4 SMD Supreme:
http://www.cometpinball.com/product-p/4smd3528.htm

The only thing at risk by doing this is your LED bulbs. All the other components can easily handle it. Even the bulbs are a bit of crapshoot when it comes to the correct maximum setting. The resistor inside the bulb will determine how much current flows through the LED emitter, and there is no standard resistor value across different vendors, or even different bulbs from the same vendor. The default setting is a conservative value, and usually can go higher without any problems.

I tried the delay of 5 as well, and I also noticed (but it may not have been the LED OCD) is that there was a noticeable delay (more than I would've expected) in inserts triggering. In particular, when special is lit on one of the outlanes and it alternates when a slingshot is hit. If that's the case, it could likely happen to other inserts as well.

The delay of 1 or 2 is perfect (at least for RBION) IMO as it allows for visibly smooth stepping of the extensive fading used on the machine. Slower, and it's more noticeable I think. Not that it matters really though, as whatever someone finds as perfect, as long as they're happy with it, means the board is doing it's job!

Herg: Is there any way to get some kind of a feature added to extend how long an insert is lit for if it receives a brief signal? I'm thinking in terms of using an RGB-fading LED, where it's preferable to hold a constant on rather than flashing (and resetting the cycle). For example, if something flashes briefly but constantly, the OCD converts it into an always-on signal until it stops.

PS. I used those same LEDs from Comet as well. Super cheap and do the job nicely. And also, Art is a great guy to deal with (and the shipping to Australia isn't a complete joke)

PPS. Herg, is it safe to say that if there's a major/critical update to the software (such as a feature implementation) you'd mention it in a readme in the file? Otherwise we wouldn't know if there's an improvement when the .exe is updated

Since it would be part of a matrix running at 250 Hz, there is no way to make a single bulb continue to receive power. It HAS to turn off so that the next column can turn on. You CAN try to limit the cycle resetting by keeping that single bulb's duty cycle longer than others. For example, try a ramp something like:
0 0 0 0 100 100 100 100

It might still reset, but this would at least keep it on as much of the time as possible in a matrix configuration.

Any changes made to the downloadable software are limited to the PC software. It doesn't update anything on the board, so the game will always work the same unless you replace the microcontroller with one that has different code. I hope this doesn't have to happen since it would be a major pain to mail out new chips.

As far as critical updates to the PC software, I would suggest using the latest version. If you're not experiencing problems, like data files not being read properly, etc. you can safely use the version you already have, though. The changes are almost always minimal and they will never be able to affect the boards function other than letting you set the values differently.

Corvette: It removed the unwanted blinking of the LT1 inserts in my during the skill shot. YAY! I set B1 and 2 to 0. So 0,0,10,25,50,70,85,100 Now only the one lane is lit during the skill shot like it should be. I have a bunch of inserts ghosting which I haven't been able to get rid of. These are the same inserts which ghosted before the board was installed. I might have to put the GBs back in if I can't figure it out.

LOTR: Stock settings except for the Palintir orb. I have the Eye of Sauron TV Ball mod which now blinks. Is there a way to stop the blinking? I set all B values to 100 but it still blinks.

SM - Using stock settings except in the Villain Mode inserts and white spider lane inserts. I set these to the recommended settings of 0,0,20,20,0,50,50,0,100. I had to replace the GBs with non-GB as they caused weird annoying strobing.

JM - installed GIOCD with no changes. Works great.

I have another WPC LEDOCD board but don't think my Shadow or JM need it.

have you tried increasing the delay value?

Sorry, I thought I put that in there. It is set at max 9. But doesn't that just delay the amount of time between blinks? I set it to 9 so the little TV doesn't give me a headache.