This is actually my goal. My TZ's DMD is original - 23 years old, and wasa going to be replaced with the restoraton I did. I have no interest in actually colorizing the animations, but am thinking of modifying the Pi's firmware to include a button input - on start up, it'll default to the DMD-orange, but can be cycled through other colors (Red, White, Green, Blue, etc..) with a press of the button.

There's no way at all to get around the average 5A current draw of these panels without using an external power supply. As mentioned before, it can be included.

Would there be enough current in downconverted HV?

Aww yeah! Got my RGBDMD board from ecurtz in today (a day earlier than USPS originally estimated), and I might actually have time tonight to wire it up.

Uh, that's pretty much exactly what a "power supply" is, if you think about it.

--Donnie

Agree. But I think this takes off big time as soon as Aaron has full documentation and full kits available on his site. I know I'll be getting one of the Lucky1 controller based full DMD kits (if that's the one that can do full recolouring) as soon as they're available. Has a lot more potential than ColorDMD's currently rather limited recolouring system IMO .. also since eventually I'm likely to stream, there'll be no viewing angle issues per the TN LCDs.

Available ? Our controller kit has been available for months now as a group buy at vpuniverse.com forum organized by UncleSash.
We have already 200 users of pin2dmd. http://vpuniverse.com/forums/forum/132-pin2dmd/
You can order the displays from fast pinball and connect the controller kit, which is in fact plug & play

I can understand the desire for a one-stop-shop that provides a full kit, but ultimately there's likely to be some wiring needed depending on how you want it to behave. I would think ideally you'd wire the external power supply into the switched power on the game so that it's off when the game is off. The alternative is plugging into the service outlet, but on many games those are constantly powered.

There's also the potential for oddball setup that I don't think a kit can fully accommodate. For example, Starship Troopers and Jurassic Park that I own sandwich the DMD controller PCB right behind the DMD. I'll need to come up with some fancy mounting for this extra board. Conversely, my Super Mario Bros has the DMD controller up in the backbox and nothing but the DMD gets mounted to the speaker panel. This one will be pretty easy to mount the extra board to.

The kits have been out of stock from Sash for a few weeks. I think his message said he'll be back in stock in 3 weeks.

He's currently assembling the last order he ran. Once he's finished assembling and shipping, he'll reopen for another order.

I just got my rgbdmd and the pin2dmd kit yesterday. I am reading through the documentation which is serviceable for a diy kit. As far as doing the cool keyframe coloring you actually need to set up pinmame and with the help of a custom dll you need to get a dump of the dmd and then compress it into a gz file and then import it into the pin2dmd editor. After that you need to step through and set keyframes and custom pallets.

TL;DR don't expect it to be something quick.

I'm happy to mess around on my PC (though I'm likely to be crap at recolouring). I'd rather click one button to get a kit in one box though, and I suspect that's the same for the majority, hence why ColorDMD has been so successful.

Yes people will pay more for a quick streamlined solution but I personally prefer non lcd display for a more authentic look. Also I like to tinker so it's a win/win for me/ I would suggest the grey scale approach to TZ due to the fact that the show was black and white.

Now if we were talking about bride of pinbot 2.0 for TZ then I might be more into lcd display and some video and graphics overhaul.

tz_(resized).JPG

Hard to compare this to ColorDMD for games that ColorDMD already colorizes. But for games that it doesn't, it's a lot cheaper. The other big advantage I see once they can compete head to head (because the community starts colorizing games) is that this solution actually fits the hole and only the hole. ColorDMD won't fit a few games at all, but even the ones that it does fit it can cause interference with your ability to do light mods to the backbox. I've got shadows in my Metallica due to the custom backbox mod conflicting with the ColorDMD, for example.

I'm pretty sure ColorDMD is working on an LED product, too, now. Will be interesting to see when/if they do that and what their solution costs. They'll still have a market for the LCD version as some people really like Sigma, and I get that. And they'll be able to leverage their current colorizing work to the LED platform, too, I'm sure. Should be interesting to see.

--Donnie

It's not hard to compare for me. I just don't like LCD DMDs for old graphics. You might like it and that's fine but I like the look of led or plasma.

PIN2DMD is a non commercial community project which will and can not compete to ColorDMD under
professional aspects. It is no turnkey, plug & play solution with preprogrammed colorization for certain machines and professional support.
It is a platform where every motivated programmer can contribute to and give any idea a try
or every user with basic pc knowledge can share his colorization mods with the community. A special advantage for me is that it brings the community from real pinball machines and virtual pinball machines together to share their mods.
Although a lot a requests came from dealers all over the world, there is no intention to commercialize it in any way.
The only thing we do is kindly request a donation for our work, which we forward to a charity project.

True passion! Thanks!!!

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that it was a commercial competitor. Or that it could or should be.

It's an option for someone wanting to DIY, though, and thus some comparisons are valid. Nothing more, nothing less.

--Donnie

Was not a reply to your post. Just to make our point clear. In the case of ColorDMD competition leads to nothing but having to deal with patents they own and maybe lawyers. From my point of view the money we would make out of pin2dmd is not worth the trouble.
It´s just a hobby.

It's not like you're infringing on any patents as long as you don't write a mechanism to dynamically add hand-written chroma information to the existing luma channel. Full RGB frame replacing (PPS style) is a different mechanism from ColorDMD.

That´s just interpretation. I don´t know what or what not is part of the patent, because I´m not a patent lawyer and even a lawyer is not a judge. So to definitely find out we would have to go to court. In europe, where I live, every private, non commercial development is free of patent infringement of any kind anyways. So no danger for me from that side, but I totally respect the work of ColorDMD and don´t want to endanger his business by competing commercially.

Edit: Removing my post. I'm not educated on the patents in question and am not trying to persuade anyone to violate anything.

I had a longer conversation with Randy about his patent (http://www.google.com/patents/US8773452).
We came to the agreement, that that US patent issues may not be a concern until Pin2DMD is commercialized for sale in the US, which is totally O.K. for me.

removed on request

Please remove this private communication from the forum. It has been taken out of context and there is no agreement in place between ColorDMD and Pin2DMD regarding the use of our IP.

If your solution is novel and developed indepedently, it won't infringe the patent even in the US, even if the mechanic is identical. But since your software is non commercial, freely distributed and you're not in the US it's moot anyway.

That is what I told Randy also. He believes that every color pinball DMD output which is not a static palette mapped to the 4/16 shades is covered by his patent and threatens everybody with his lawyer who thinks different. He believes that even the PIN2DMD Editor is infringing his patent and not allowed in the land of the free. Steve and I had a longer conversation with him the last days. Where I live a idea is not patentable only the technical realization of it. If he thinks he is safe from competition of any kind with his patent and leave colordmd as it is as the only solution for the next years, he maybe should rethink his business strategy. Here is my last E-Mail I sent him about that.

Your patent clearly only covers a piece of hardware and not software.
Software is not even patentable in germany.

I think this leads to nothing. All I can see is that the community has created
something which obviously wasn´t there before and there seems to be a demand
for it. I just started it, but I don´t think you can stop this by trying to convince Steve or me.
There are still a lot of users asking for a turnkey solution with a color LED display and a professional
editor tool to be creative, which we won´t serve. Maybe you should do it before somebody else
does.

That's pretty sad. The ludicrous patent system in the US breeds and encourages this kind of behaviour, even when it clearly is over reach.

Even if a US court granted him an injunction (which they can't and won't), there would be no jurisdiction to enforce it ... and worst thing you'd have to do anyway is IP block US IPs from your website or make sure that Aaron and others do not include your software with the full kits they put together.

I'm sure the ColorDMD guys know all this. It's just posturing to try to maintain a monopoly. Even if you were located in the US & intent on selling the software, they'd risk putting themselves out of business by pursuing you .... unless of course their margins are much higher than they have let on (not unlikely given their aggressiveness).

Have the ColorDMD folks made any claims concerning people selling a Pin2DMD product that's complete and plug-and-play to let the user simply select any monochrome color they want from a menu? That is, would they consider THAT infringement? Obviously software exists in downloadable form to do much more than that, including things that might infringe, but that situation exists for a LOT of hardware on the market....

--Donnie

Behavior like this and indirectly complaining about competition has a very negative effect on me. I don't think I will buy any ColorDMD after seeing this.

You and me both.

With Lucky1's Pin2Dmd (I think.. I keep seeing different names thrown around).. I see it easily as a group of people sharing colorization files in a repository (SVN, GIT) and working to build colorization on a game..

Me three.

Have been taking a wait and see approach with ColorDMD to see how they further develop software and hardware, and to see what competition arrives. I'd pretty much made up my mind that I'd get one for Popeye at next availability, then wait a while after that. But with this kind of attitude, I'd rather go without regardless of what they come up with in future.

This. I would love to contribute a few colorized scenes of a less popular game like a Gottlieb or Data East title I'm familiar with if/when the tools become available and open source projects start to form.

EDITED.
It was brought to my attention that my comment could be misinterpreted as an attack on coyote. I'm sorry if it was. I'll leave this thread and I hope you believe me when I say i just want to help these projects and the community

Retracted

Retracted

Keyword being community, we are talking such a small percentage of consumers (maybe a fraction of a fraction) who have a pinball machine and would consider anything beyond a replacment plasma or led. The last thing you want to sound like is a lawyer when talking to such a tiny market. Bullying won't be tolerated and that post by Dmod could have been worded much better. We are all here because we love pinball and want to see it grow and not be segmented into markets.

I totally understand that Randy tries to protect what is his, and that is ColorDMD how it is and sold for years now.
Ideas are not patentable. Only technical realizations of it are. I only wrote the device software and didn´t use a single line of code from colordmd. We use a widely usable dev board and a adapter pcb, which is also totally different. We use a different display type etc.
As technology moves on new possiblities came up and we used them to realize our own ideas. In my case it was using a color LED display instead of a standard pinball display for my virtual pin project. I think there are two potential customer groups in the community. On one side we have the ones which prefer high res / high color like ColorDMD offers it. And on the other we have the ones who like the brightness and look of a LED Display. Only a few would switch. Problem for Randy might be that he couldn´t serve the second group, because technology was not available and now that it is available he doesn´t have the product to serve it. But that has nothing to do with patent infringement.

ColorDMD should just add a hub75 connector to there hardware spend 5min writing the fpga driver to drive those displays and offer the LED modules as an lcd alternative. Not that much work for them. They most likely are already doing this?

That´s exactly what I suggested to Randy.

The other group not served is the ones that colordmd can't do, ie Rocky and bullwinlke, etc. I would love a turnkey colored option, but if its not avail, something with some relatively simple instructions would be fine. I think any "cartoon" based pin just screams for some color. As well as many others.

I've got this nice RGB LED panel from Fast Pinball and nothing to plug it into. Does anybody have any DMD to RGB panel interface they can sell me?

Pin2DMD has implemented some kind of activation code to use with their hardware and software. It is all pretty confusing. They don't have any boards available for sale anyway. Maybe I will get one later. For now, I will give RGB.DMD a try. I'll send you a PM.

I don't think you'll be disappointed. I ordered an assembled unit from ecurtz and it worked out of the box in my JP and SST. The only thing you might need to do is set up the software on your computer so you can write your own palette to the board and adjust the brightness to your liking. Unless something has changed, the default pallet is shades of gray (kind of a black and white tv look).

I have no experience with PIN2DMD yet. I think I'm receiving my board for that today or tomorrow.

I'd love to see some video of your JP or SST in color if you ever get a chance!

Great. I just ordered it. Mine is going into Dr Who and probably STTNG after that, then probably AFM after that so I'll need to order more. I also got a friend who just got a TZ and would love the B/W palette. He's waiting to see how mine turns out.

So far I only did quick plug and play tests with JP and SST. At the moment I've only got the one RGBDMD board, and I've been working with ecurtz to try to get Gottlieb System 3 running better. My hope is that if we can get it working well, it will reside in my Super Mario Bros.

I don't intend to install in JP any time soon as I've already got an LCD in it (albeit with a cracked LCD after an accident, so will probably move over to RGB LED panels at some point). I will permanently install an RGB LED solution in SST soon, though.

I'll try to get some video when I've got something permanently installed, but so far any video recordings I've made haven't been good representations of the product. I'm almost hesitant to post anything in fear that I would be making it look bad.

I've been VERY happy with Eli's board. Waiting for the Pin2DMD ones to come back in stock. I'd like to try it too but I am REALLY warming up (was never cold, so super warming) to RGB.DMD

I have had the same issue. I plan on doing a full video when I have time and get the other board in my Popeye

Send me a PM when you have it. I want to make sure that you have the latest version with new USB dump functionality from real pinball machine for the upcoming version of Steves editor. The activation thing was necessary because there were some rumors about unapproved commercial sale of our little community project which we want to prevent.