(Topic ID: 48361)

Introducing Airfield, an LED kit for wall-hung playfields (PRICE DROP)

By PinHacks

10 years ago


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  • 78 posts
  • 47 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 7 years ago by roar
  • Topic is favorited by 15 Pinsiders

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    There are 78 posts in this topic. You are on page 2 of 2.
    #51 10 years ago
    Quoted from snyper2099:

    Not trying to discourage your product here but it's just WAY too expensive for what it does.

    So is a topper. At least in my mind.

    #52 10 years ago
    Quoted from mspaeth:

    You don't drive the LEDs directly, you drive fets that drive the LEDs.
    If I'd designed this, I would have just done GI outputs separately and the lamps as a matrix so it'd be easy to interface to the real playfield wiring, and use lamps or LEDs, sold and installed separately.
    IMHO, there's far too much labor cost involved in soldering and shrinkwrapping the LEDs to the phone cords, which is unnecessary given a pre-wired playfield.

    I agree

    I would be interested in a board that can output the Williams matrix and can be installed on a populated pf just by plugging in the lamp harness. For blank pf's it would be cake to wire up just the lamp sockets and put the connectors on. Or on a pf that I was stripping I could remove everything except the lamp harness and sockets.
    Or an alternate board that does the bally lamp configuration of all having separate outputs on a common bus but that can still drive the existing commonly used LED lamps (in #44 or #555 packages with resistors etc)

    #53 10 years ago

    I think it's cool that there are alternate visions for Airfield. A board that expects a game's stock matrix wiring to be in place is interesting, and I hope one of you follows through with it. As for software, would you code your own sequences or try to emulate the pinball ROM?

    My feeling is expecting users to wire a pinball lamp matrix narrows the market a bit too much, in case they're not working with a populated playfield. Our solution is easy to wire, completely platform agnostic, and results in less space between the playfield and the wall. Plus our light sequencing tool is fast, flexible and pretty accessible to non-techies. Don't overlook it when judging or appraising the product, even though access is free.

    By the way, I forgot to mention that we can include free RJ11 connectors to anyone who wants them, if you have a 6p4c crimper and wish to shorten the length of the LED cables. Just add them to your cart when checking out.

    #54 10 years ago

    Technically, you could use my LED OCD board to drive the matrix. The output connectors are pin compatible with a System 11 wiring harness, and you could write your own code to run on the PIC microcontroller that included sequences. If anyone is serious about trying this, I have a small number of bare boards that would make it easy to build up the output transistor drivers and microcontroller sections.

    I hope that this is not viewed as hijacking PinHacks' thread. The people who would go through all the trouble to go this route would probably not be his market, anyway. PinHacks' approach is much more elegant.

    #55 10 years ago

    Attention: price drop!

    That's right pinheads, Airfield has only been on sale for 3 days now, but we've done some illuminating market analysis and decided to lower the price to $219. This is rock bottom. At this price, we will pretty much break even on the project. That's cool though, because our goal right now is to get Airfields out into the world and behind your spare playfields. So let's do that. Previous buyers, of course, have been contacted and offered a refund of the difference.

    BONUS: We'll still honor the 10% coupon code "launchweek" if you use it before this Monday, May 13!

    #56 10 years ago

    Soooooooooo tempting at that price. Yeah, I'm sold.

    #57 10 years ago

    PinHacks, this looks really cool. Might I suggest that you do some wire management and clean up your "installed-look" marketing picture on your home page. The tape and stray wires don't exactly help sell your product. You have put a lot of effort in generating a custom UI and boardset, you might as well complete the look on your product page.

    Good luck! I'll be looking into this when I have my space Space Shuttle PF ready to mount.

    -Wes

    #58 10 years ago
    Quoted from copperpot:

    PinHacks, this looks really cool. Might I suggest that you do some wire management and clean up your "installed-look" marketing picture on your home page. The tape and stray wires don't exactly help sell your product[...]

    Thanks for checking it out, Wes. Space Shuttle is a favorite. Do you mean the attached pic, where all the wires are neatly zip tied? Watch the help section video for the process, and you'll see that IS tidy! What you see there is what you get when you're done. But if you're looking at the back once it's installed, you're doing it wrong.

    By the way, at least one Airfield will be featured at the Bay Area Amusements booth next week at PAGG. Stop by and check it out!

    storepicrear[1].pngstorepicrear[1].png

    #59 10 years ago

    Today is the last day to use the 10% off "launchweek" coupon code. Also, there's a free delivery option to PAGG for those of you attending the show. See you there!

    #60 10 years ago

    Ordered! Always wanted to build something like this, but of course never have the time. This will give me time to work on my playfield swap projects instead

    Question - how long is the AC adapter cord that's included? Hopefully more than a couple feet, as the nearest outlet to where I want to hang my playfield is not that far away, but not directly below the playfield either.

    thanks!

    #61 10 years ago

    Two questions:

    What is the draw from the board itself? Specifically, in an effort to make wall art without a long cord, could I feed 4 1.5V AAs via a battery pack into your device?

    Secondly, I have a ton of 3mm and 5mm LEDs in various colors. Can I swap color matching LEDs into my inserts (wasn't sure how your white ones come and how the LED resistors are done to ensure proper forward voltage).

    TIA,
    Evan

    #62 10 years ago
    Quoted from andre060:

    Question - how long is the AC adapter cord that's included?

    Got your order, Andre. Thanks! The power cable is 3.75' long, so you may need an extension cord. We had far fewer options sourcing 6 Volt wall warts than 5V, but we needed the extra power to balance out stability with LED brightness. Hopefully this works for you -- you can also get extension cords for the barrel jack like this one:

    http://www.adafruit.com/products/327

    Quoted from wxforecaster:

    What is the draw from the board itself? Specifically, in an effort to make wall art without a long cord, could I feed 4 1.5V AAs via a battery pack into your device?

    Hi, Evan. In our tests, we max out at 230 milliamps at 6V, with all lights on constantly. I'm not sure how long 4 AA batteries would last, but I would certainly appreciate you telling me! You could also try using 4 rechargeable NiMH and bypass the 5V regulator. NiMH batteries only output about 1.2V, so you'd want to bypass our 5V LDO regulator to maximize your LED brightness. No telling if the chips will like it, but it's worth experimenting. Please let me know how it goes!

    Quoted from wxforecaster:

    Secondly, I have a ton of 3mm and 5mm LEDs in various colors. Can I swap color matching LEDs into my inserts (wasn't sure how your white ones come and how the LED resistors are done to ensure proper forward voltage).

    Our matrix components only support one forward voltage for all LEDs, so it's not recommended to try adding different bulbs to the matrix. The worst that could happen is you'd burn out your LEDs though, so it might be worth a try.

    #63 10 years ago

    Alkaline AA cells top out at about 3000 mAh capacity, so with a 230 mA draw, you're looking at about 13 hours.

    #64 10 years ago

    Gotta say I'm curious how you're only drawing 230mA with all lights on simultaneously. I would assume your chip has some draw and LEDs draw approx. 20mA each. I certainly would be curious to hear the answer w/o getting into your "trade secrets" as my electrical knowledge is novice at best. If this is true and assuming that all the lights are far from "all lit simultaneously", a 4 NiMH battery pack w/ an adapter plug (like I use on my arduino) would provide pretty long term power before recharging for something that would only be running when we're in the game room.

    I'm this close to being "in" as a test pilot

    #65 10 years ago
    Quoted from wxforecaster:

    Gotta say I'm curious how you're only drawing 230mA with all lights on simultaneously. I would assume your chip has some draw and LEDs draw approx. 20mA each.

    You're correct, our LEDs draw about 20 mA each, but the magic is in the matrix. Technically, only 8 LEDs are on at a time, but persistence of vision makes it appear as though all 64 are lit. The matrix is driven by a MAX7219, which has a very high pulse rate so there is no visible flicker like you see in pinball machines. Plus, there's 8 GI lamps that get constant current... unless you dim them, which employs PWM from the ATMEGA328 (Arduino).

    When I advertised low power, I meant it!

    herg: Thanks for doing the math on that. Good to know.

    airfieldCurrent.JPGairfieldCurrent.JPG

    #66 10 years ago

    Thanks for the super fast follow-up. I had a couple of further questions for you, but since the answers might fringe on intellectual property, I'll PM you. This would be pretty awesome to get 10-12 hours of life out of rechargeable NiMH's, and possibly well more than that considering the number of lamps typically lit at any given moment.

    #67 10 years ago

    Price was too good to pass - just ordered, and free bump for the last day of the sale. Who wants to sell me a spare playfield??

    #68 10 years ago
    Quoted from Mudflaps:

    Price was too good to pass - just ordered, and free bump for the last day of the sale. Who wants to sell me a spare playfield??

    I've got a decent Dr Who if you like the Dr.

    5 months later
    #69 10 years ago

    Whats a good way to hang the playfield onto your wall?

    2 months later
    #70 10 years ago

    This looks like an awesome product.

    Thinking about doing this with an extra MM playfield I have putting in a new one last year. Just curious to get some feedback from those that have tried it. How was the setup/install process? Results? Thanks!

    1 year later
    #71 8 years ago

    What is currently going on with this product? Any new info?

    1 year later
    #72 7 years ago

    I updated the first post to reflect a $99 clearance sale. Come and get 'em!

    5 months later
    #73 7 years ago
    Quoted from mspaeth:

    You don't drive the LEDs directly, you drive fets that drive the LEDs.
    If I'd designed this, I would have just done GI outputs separately and the lamps as a matrix so it'd be easy to interface to the real playfield wiring, and use lamps or LEDs, sold and installed separately.
    IMHO, there's far too much labor cost involved in soldering and shrinkwrapping the LEDs to the phone cords, which is unnecessary given a pre-wired playfield.

    An arduino can drive hundreds (probably thousands) of LEDs. It doesn't need to regulate the power to the LEDs. If you use neopixels you just drive the data line and hardwire power to the strip.

    The solution these guys are selling is different than what I'd do. I'd use serial, digital LEDs in a sequence. I'm actually working on a system to do this and will be releasing some videos on it soon. But it's neat - it's always cool to see people hacking this stuff.

    1 week later
    #74 7 years ago

    Anyone have an Airfield they want to sell me or is there a new solution available? I won a Wizord of Oz playfield that would look nice all lit up (and it appears someones already made an Airfield profile for it).

    #75 7 years ago
    Quoted from guruguy:

    Anyone have an Airfield they want to sell me or is there a new solution available? I won a Wizord of Oz playfield that would look nice all lit up (and it appears someones already made an Airfield profile for it).

    The project has actually been open sourced with the full BOM and schematics for the boards so you could piece one together for yourself if you are ambitious. I was close to moving ahead with doing it myself but ran into some challenges getting one of the parts on the BOM.

    Jeremy has some left over stock of the missing piece but shipping the lot up to Canada was cost prohibitive for me. If anyone does get those parts and is interested in shipping out just the few that are needed I'd be in again.

    As well if anyone wants to go in on splitting an order of boards I'm up for that too. Most places like elecrow have a minimum board order.

    #76 7 years ago
    Quoted from roar:

    The project has actually been open sourced with the full BOM and schematics for the boards so you could piece one together for yourself if you are ambitious. I was close to moving ahead with doing it myself but ran into some challenges getting one of the parts on the BOM.
    Jeremy has some left over stock of the missing piece but shipping the lot up to Canada was cost prohibitive for me. If anyone does get those parts and is interested in shipping out just the few that are needed I'd be in again.
    As well if anyone wants to go in on splitting an order of boards I'm up for that too. Most places like elecrow have a minimum board order.

    I own one of these but would like to do some more. Do you have a link to the specs and the parts needed?

    #77 7 years ago

    All of the source files are up on GitHub:
    https://github.com/r3cgm/airfield

    The part guruguy mentioned is the 8-way RJ11 gang jacks (Airfield uses 4 of them per-board). I had to buy several hundred from Taiwan to do the project, and still have a box of 470 left over. I'm happy to send them to anyone for free if they want to pay for the shipping. The box is 22x13x10 and weighs about 18 pounds.

    #78 7 years ago

    I'd chip in on the shipping costs anyone would take on to get some of the RJ11 gang jacks as well as cover the shipping costs to get a dozen or so up to me... or look to do a swap of some of the RJ11 for some of the bare boards.

    There are 78 posts in this topic. You are on page 2 of 2.

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