LED OCD is an add-on lamp controller that solves the following problems when using LEDs in pinball machines.

- Eliminate the flicker or strobe effect when using LEDs in a pinball machine. This is accomplished by increasing the lamp matrix scan rate.
- Allow brightness to be controlled. "Profiles" are configured to define the on-time of lamps, effectively controlling the brightness.
- Simulate the fade on/off of incandescent lamps. By gradually changing the brightness of the bulbs, LEDs are made to fade on/off instead of their typical abrupt changes.
- Allow ghosting to be completely eliminated through a combination of additional hardware and improved transistor control.

Some videos are linked below.

It currently works with Williams WPC, Williams System 11, Stern, and Data East machines.

For more information, visit the website:
http://ledocd.com

If you want to be put on the waiting list to purchase one, please send a pre-order request through the website purchase page. As much as I love Pinside, PMs are just too hard to manage.

Here's a couple of pictures of the finished boards:

IMG_4448.JPG IMG_4100_2.JPG

Also, if you're interested in reading some of the development history, that thread's here:
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/my-current-project-led-lamp-controller

Thanks, Dan.

I rarely used LEDs before developing the board. LEDs are a bit of a mixed bag, but used properly, they look great, IMO.

Some of the boards should be arriving at their destination today. I can't explain it, but I'm more excited about that than I was the day my Tron arrived.

The Southern Pinball Festival (http://www.southernpinballfestival.com/) is being held this weekend. If you're able, I highly suggest attending. You'll have a great time, and if you want, you can see LED OCD in person. PT is planning to bring his No Fear with LED OCD installed to the show.

Some of the first batch have arrived at their new homes. If anyone has installed one and would like to share any comments/complaints, I'd like to hear them. I'd like to know if people are happy with these before building more.

The remainder of the first batch has been built, and once they're tested, I'll be contacting the next names on the list.

Finally, I have one in my Tron (Pro), and it's very close to finished. I have not yet looked into the list of other Stern machines that this will support. It certainly will NOT be useful with the newer machines that have LED boards with serial control, but I believe it will work with the rest.

Thanks. The effect starting at 0:30 is what I feel is most indicative of what it can do. It looks terrible with stock LEDs.

I'd really like to see what it does with games with dimmed inserts. Spider-Man villains for instance.

PT deserves the thanks for that. All I did was send him the board. It was his machine, he installed and configured the board, and he transported the game.

The configuration software is currently for Windows only, but the interface is simply a USB UART, and drivers are available for MacOS, Linux, etc. If anyone is truly interested, I'd be willing to work with them to document the protocol.

Also, once it's configured, you don't need the PC unless you want to change settings.

I'd love to be able to test in more machines, including Whitestar, System11 and older, Data East, etc, but since I don't own any, I have to rely on others.

Here's a new video of DCFAN's Spider-Man both before and after installing an OCD board. This required some experimentation to figure out what each brightness level in the machine translated to in terms of LED OCD configuration levels. In the near future, I will try to put together an explanation of what we did. For now, enjoy:

OK, let's see if I can describe this properly.

First, the machine had a full treatment of Ablaze Ghostbuster LEDs. They have additional circuitry in them to prevent them from turning on in low current and/or short pulse conditions. This also causes them to not turn on when set to low brightness settings with LED OCD. It's the same with CT Premium bulbs.

When we first added the OCD board, and turned the machine on, attract mode was not very impressive. By default, the bulbs are set for the following brightness ramp:
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 85

Testing them using the manual test method described on the LED OCD webpage, however showed that the lamps did not turn on at all until about 22%, and were flickery up to about 40%. This caused the default settings to be rough and flickery since the low end brightness values did not work well with the GB LEDs. I changed the ramp to:
40 46 52 59 65 72 78 85

This was much better, but a bit dim, so I increased the top end of the brightness ramp making it:
40 48 57 65 74 82 91 100

Short of a few bulbs that could still be brighter, attract mode now looked pretty good. Remember these were Ablaze GB, and brightness is really not their strong point.

Once we started lighting the Villain inserts, there was still some mild flicker. I needed to find out which output brightness levels were being used for each of the Villain mode levels. With Green Goblin at level 1, I checked the Advanced checkbox in the configuration software and changed the LED OCD ramp to:
100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Since this didn't light at all, I knew B1 was not being used at all at level 1. Changed to:
0 100 0 0 0 0 0 0

This caused the lamp to flicker, so B2 *is* being used at level 1. I continued this process to map which output levels were used at level 1. We advanced GG to level 2, repeated the process, ... Finally, we had the following mapping:
Villain Level 0 - Off
Villain Level 1 - B2 & B3
Villain Level 2 - B5 & B6
Villain Level 3 - B8

In order to have a dimly lit Villain insert be steady, the B2/B3 pair needed to set to the same value, as well as the B5/B6 pair. I changed the ramp to:
40 48 48 60 75 75 90 100

The flicker in the Villain inserts was gone, but you really couldn't tell a difference between a dimly lit (Level 1) and fully lit (Level 3) insert. I played with it some, but there wasn't much I could do. The low end being limited to a minimum of 40% really limited what I was able to do. This same ramp turned out to be appropriate to avoid strobing on the 2X bonus white arrow insert.

We also put a couple of Ablaze 3-LED bulbs in Green Goblin and Doc Ock, and I was able to reduce the low end to 10% without flicker. This allowed me more flexibility in separating the brightness of each mode level, but you'd still be hard pressed to tell between Level 2 and Level 3.

In summary:
LED OCD can be used to eliminate the flicker caused by progressive dimming with LEDs.
The process to fully configure it can be a bit involved, but once a game it figured out, applying it to different bulbs is trivial.
The progressive dimming effect, even when it's not flickering, is not terribly useful.

If anyone is hesitant about waiting on a pre-order list, I've caught up on the Stern SAM ones, and I have a few in stock now. I should be through the end of the WPC list by next week.

Also, if anyone who has bought these has any comments, please let me know. I have to assume that everyone is happy with them unless I hear otherwise. Feedback is the best way to know what I can improve.

It's kinda funny. I saw a huge jump in video views and had no idea where they were coming from. I didn't realize PinballHead had such a large audience.

Yeah, for use with premiums, I would at a minimum change the low end brightness to around 40%.

VMware may be worth trying as an intermediate solution. Obviously, something that runs natively on Mac and Linux would be better. Unfortunately, GUI work is not my strong suit, and I don't have access to a Mac. I could probably stumble through a Java GUI, but with everything that I have going on now, I'm not terribly motivated. I would, however, be willing to work with anyone who does have the motivation to define the interface. Drivers are available for other platforms, and it's simply a bunch of short messages sent over a USB COM port.

Super brights do work very well. Pretty much any LED without anti-ghosting features will work better than those with. Isn't that ironic? What happens is that the short pulses that are necessary to do low brightness levels get squashed by the anti-ghosting feature in the fancy bulbs.

Super brights and retro (SB with a dome), I use very sparingly since to me, they are too bright, and they are more expensive than the CT Frosted and AB 3-LED. I do use cool white retro in my Tron disks because you can see the bulb. I set them to 20% max brightness, though.

That's true. If you don't factor money, you certainly do have more range with them. I probably like mine dimmer than many others, and I rarely need more brightness than a CT Frosted or AB 3 provides, so my approach is to go cheap, then replace with brighter where necessary.

The one very minor nitpick is that at the low end (B1), if you have to set them to 6% to avoid flicker (typical), dimmer bulbs will allow you a dimmer minimum brightness. This makes the transition from OFF to B1 slightly smoother. Again, this is a very minor issue, and probably proves I do have OCD.

A machine full of supers will be a great starting point, and it will be very unlikely you'll need to change anything.

Zdoor,

Thanks for the feedback. At first when I read your comment about shooter lane controlled GI, I thought it may be a placebo effect, since GI aren't affect by OCD. After looking at the manual, however, I see there are 9 lamps on the matrix next to the shooter lane.

A few updates:

This evening, I used VMWare to run the configuration software on a Linux box. There's no reason I can think of that it would not work for Mac as well.

I have tested successfully with both System 11 (BK2K) and Stern Whitestar (LOTR SE).

I have decided that building the boards by hand is too much work, and I have identified a source for assembly. However, the number of pre-orders I currently have is not enough to make the minimum order worthwhile. I'd also like to get a little more feedback before investing in a bunch of assembled boards. I'll have to work through this before any more kits are available.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to hear you like it. I'm all about trying to make things "less obnoxious."

Which cables, and how much longer? I will try to address it if / when I make more. I don't want to make them too long and have to deal with a wad of wire, though.