Always connect your grounds. Everything else can be very dangerous (unless you know exactly what you are doing). I recommend: http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/hardware/voltages_and_power/voltages_and_power.html and http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/hardware/voltages_and_power/wiring_and_connectors.html. For legal stuff about grounding: http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/hardware/voltages_and_power/ground_and_appliance_classes.html

Awesome benchmark! MPF can also help you to reduce the peak current in your machine. You can set "max_wait_ms" in your coil_player to allow MPF to sequence coil pulses to reduce stress on your PSU and maybe also on the NTC. No pulses will skipped. They might just happen a few ms later. We use this internally for drops, score reels and ball devices. Score reels on older machines will often fail without this because MPF would fire a lot of coils concurrently. Obviously this is nothing for flippper fingers or pops. But in a lot of other areas this can help to smooth out currents. Spike does something very similar.

Another option would be to use those: https://squareup.com/market/fast-pinball-llc/item/fast-rgb-led-insert. Or run your own PCBs. We fabbed some in China for larger inserts with multiple LEDs each for higher brightness and additional effects.

Jan

Good progress! I'm looking forward to this machine in action.

A lot for rules for an EM. Well done!

MPF will happily send 3, 4 or 10 bytes per LED. It only depends on how many channels you define for a light. A light channel is just a brightness. It then depends on the platform how those are applied to the hardware (i.e. serially for WS281X). Internally, a light still uses RGB for colors though (because that is how most applications work with color). However, we can calculate a white channel based on RGB. I implemented the simplest possible algorithm for that. There are better ones but nobody implemented them yet.

Looks awesome! Much more fun to play than the original game. Sound is great. Guess the ball should not stay locked on the top, right?

Jan

That board looks pretty awesome! Glad it is finally fully functional.