New Orleans, LA
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.
