Hi

This is my first foray onto Pinside. I wanted to let you know about a project I've been working on and wanted to see what interest there is out there.

I call the project DMD Extender and it's designed to recreate the DMD display on an external monitor. I can see it being used as a centre piece in a pinball collection or maybe for competition situations where an audience will be able to see the action more clearly.

I live in the UK and have a background in IT and have been collecting pinball machines for around 5 years.

Here's the link to my YouTube video:

It'd be great to get some feedback and interest in this project.

Cheers

David.

Koen

Glad you like it! Answering your questions...

1) Yes it can work without the DMD connected, although it still needs the driver board installed. There are 2 sockets on the Extender board for the DMD ribbon cables - only the input (from the driver board) is needed to make the external display work.

2) It only works on Bally / Williams because I only have games by this manufacturer. I suspect that if the same 128 X 32 display is used by other manufacturers then the same screen logic will also be employed so the Extender should work.
The power supply for the board is taken from the power driver board - for other manufacturers it may be necessary to use an external supply which is just a mobile phone charger (micro USB).

Best wishes

David.

If your AV unit has HDMI / DVI or Composite inputs then it should work.

Regards

David.

Raspberry Pi is great - cheap, powerful and flexible

Russo121 - I presume you've seen my other prototype on YouTube - this will happen next year, but there are a few extras that need developing.

luvthatapex2 - I am intending the finished software to allow user selection of the 4 shades used to generate the dots, so you'll be able to tailor to suit your game.

Cool. Thanks for the encouragement.

Thanks for all your comments.

I'm initially looking at this being a commercial product - I haven't had a normal job (as my wife would call it) for a few months, this project has filled my time so I'd like to make it into something full time.

As for ColorDMD - it may well be possible and I had thought along the same lines as the comments above. However I'm not of a mind to start treading on toes seeing as I'm new to all of this!

The output is strictly limited to HDMI / DVI / Composite - it would require another interface developing to stand any chance of driving a bare LCD. For example, I believe the ColorDMD team use a more suitable processor which contains a lot of the necessary interfacing for these type of screens.

Thanks again for all your comments.

David

Hi

Sorry for not giving further updates - I've been tremendously busy with the project and wanted to wait until I had made some decent progress...

Data East / Sega - With the help of a fellow pinhead I now support DE / Sega games using 128 X 32 resolution displays. Hopefully support for larger format screens will happen soon.

RgbDmd - Using the same hardware as the extender I can now demonstrate real time colouring of DMD frames. The following YouTube video shows the editor and extender software system in action. Let me know your thoughts! Be gentle though it's still early days...

Now that this system is looking to be working I intend to pursue building a replacement display system using an LCD screen. The RgbDmd software will be available for use by anyone so hopefully we'll start to see colour appearing on all machines.

Cheers

David.

Seems my ISP has a problem with transatlantic comms! It works fine from UK but that's no consolation I guess - please keep trying, it will download.

The Extender shows exactly what's shown on the DMD i.e. the full animated dot image, plus you can add your own graphics to surround the dot matrix portion of the screen. It's fully configurable so you can set where the DMD is displayed on the screen and create graphics to suit as a surround.

An example would be to configure the dot matrix portion to sit at the bottom of the screen and infill the large space left at the top of the screen with a game related graphic (supplied as a bitmap and placed on the Extender SD Card by you).

In the attachments from Russo121 he has selected to place the dot matrix portion in the centre of the screen and provided a bitmap that fills in above and below the dot matrix.

Have a look at my website to see it in action and for usage and installation instructions...
http://www.drpinball.co.uk

As Russo121 said, I'm working on a screen kit. It'll have a custom screen surround, power supply board and necessary connecting cables. This will take a couple of weeks to get going but I'll keep you updated with progress.

Cheers.