For changing out your route games, this LED panel seems like it might be the most cost effective if the boards/software aren't too pricey. I guess the power supply is another factor, but you may have been dealing with that for the LCDs anyway. At any rate, these panels should lead to zero required changes to speaker panels.

I'd jump on board a group buy, too, and would pay a little extra for the effort, if anyone already has a payment method setup in aliexpress and would want to manage it.

Patience....

The STM32 discovery board I use costs about 15$.
The connector board should be around the same price
if you sum up the price for the needed components.
Our software will be open source and free for non-commercial
DIY use. If somebody want´s to sell a plug and play package with
our software, I´m open to offers Currently I haven´t planed to
do this by myself.

Keep up the good work gang. I'd be happy to help; but, it sounds like we've got the right chefs in the kitchen on this one. This looks like it might be the bulletproof solution to our ticking plasma time bombs.

Sounds promising! So the software will be free unless you're selling it as a kit or something?

Software is free unless you try to make money in any kind with it.

Using them in a route environment wouldn't be an issue if an additional fee was paid? I'm sure nobody would have any problems with that. The extra effort and time is well worth it to me.

i hope someone does a plug and play, programmed for xyz game if possible. I don't know if i have the tools to do that part, don't really know what it would entail. watching patiently...

The easiest to do would be Rocky and Bulwinkle. You can basically make a very nice color pallete based on pixel brightness (basically DMD Extender style) R & B is the VERY BEST looking game for this!

Skip to 3:45 of this vid to see it

It is 4 color. IIRC: white, tan, brown and black. That pallet is for the entire rom (not scene)

Every character is consistent throughout the rom. The 4 colors work with each character.

Most roms, have characters that varies (pixel brightness) per scene. R & B doesn't. Its consistent

Its my vid, utilizing pinmame - with colors set pet pixel percentage. The pinkish looking was probably my [EDIT] tan,
I used no tricks, no hacks, but my camera - monitor viewing angle might've altered colors slightly.I dont have pinmame running on any of my current PCs, but anyone can verify using pinmame.

EDIT ~ The tan definitely appeared pinkish.

Colors must've been: White, Pinkish Tan, Brown, and Black

Disclaimer: I have never owned (nor do I wish to) a R&B. I was just a person that discovered that games consistency within the pixel brightness settings (via PinMAME) and found a single color scheme that worked well.

I have a DMD Extender, and used it on a couple games (JM and HSII).
I messed with most every pinmame (with a dmd) game. R&B is the only game that I could make that consistent nice characters within PinMAME (DMD Extender styled)

very cool project, will be following this closely, I have done quite a bit with arduino development for some clients so if you need someone to test or mess around with it I would be more than willing

Major thumbs up for doing this! Slap on a license and post it to GitHub!

Done ! https://github.com/lucky01/PIN2DMD

http://m.aliexpress.com/store/storeHome.htm?storeNo=124897&tracelog=store2mobilestore

Looks like there's some boards that adapt standard VGA video to these displays... That's pretty neat if so.

since this is just serial data could you send it out to multiple displays? Imagine having a 2.5mm LED dmd in the normal position and then a larger LED RGB matrix display on the top of the machine on locations/tournaments, that would be super cool IMHO!

hehe I am down to find out

how many data lines is it? you could maybe run it over a pair of shielded CAT5 cables or something

Here is a part list for the connector board. Layout can be found on here
https://github.com/lucky01/PIN2DMD/tree/master/pcb

STM32F4 discovery board
China shop
ebay.com link: Stm32f4discovery Stm32f407 Cortex m4 Development Board st link V2

50 Pin Header (2x25 female, 2.54mm pitch):
China Shop:
ebay.com link: 2 54mm 100 Female pin header 50pin 2x25pin dual row pcb receptacle 4pcs
ebay.com link: 10 pcs Pitch 2 54mm 2x25 Pin 50 Pin Female Double Row Straight Header Connector
Thailand Shop:
ebay.com link: 3 pcs PCB Socket 2x25 Pins Double Row 50 Pins Female Header 2 54mm

16 Pin IDC Header: (10pcs)
China Shop:
ebay.com link: 10pcs DC3 16P Straight JTAG Socket Connector For Flat Ribbon Cable 2 Row 16 Pin

US Shop:
ebay.com link: Shrouded Header Connector AMP 16 Position Pin Straight Copper Tin 2 5mmX 8mm

14 Pin IDC Header:
Thailand Shop:
ebay.com link: 3 Pcs 2x7 14 Pin Box Header Connector 2 54 mm IDC Male Sockets Straight

China Shop:
ebay.com link: 10pcs 2 54mm IDC Box header DC3 DC3 14P 2 7 14 pins Pitch

US Shop:
ebay.com link: 4pk 2 x 7 Header Pins Straight 24653

10 Pin (or more) breakaway Header:
China Shop:
ebay.com link: 10pc black 40pin 2 54mm Single Row Breakaway Male Pin Header for Arduino uno R3

US Shop:
ebay.com link: 5pcs 1x40 Male Breakaway Pin Header Color Red Green White Yellow Black

Jumper:
China Shop:
ebay.com link: 100pcs 2pin mini micro jumper for 2 54 mm Pin Header Black Standard PCB shunts
ebay.com link: 10pcs gold plated 2 pin jumper 2 54mmHard Drive IDE CD0 1 ShuntsComputer black

US Shop:
ebay.com link: 25 2 Pin Jumpers 2 54mm 1 CD pc Scsi Ide HD net
ebay.com link: 10pcs 2 54mm 0 1 Jumper Shunts 2 pin 2 position USA Seller Free Shipping

SPI Micro SD-Card (Pin2DMD pinout match):
China Shop:
ebay.com link: Micro SD Card Module 6 Pin SPI Interface for Arduino
ebay.com link: Arduino Micro SD Card Module TF Card Reader SPI Interface Level Converter Chip D
ebay.com link: Micro SD Card Module 6Pin SPI Interface for Arduino UNO R3 MEGA 2560 DUE

US Shop:
ebay.com link: Micro SD Storage Board Card Reader Memory Shield Module SPI for Arduino
ebay.com link: 1 PC MICRO SD STORAGE CARD MEMORY SHIELD MODULE SPI INTERFACE FOR ARDUINO

Ribbon Cable with connector (16pin):
US Shop:
ebay.com link: HQ 2x8 16 Pin 2 0mm IDC JTAG ISP Cable Multiple Color Ribbon Wire

Ribbon Cable with connector (14pin):
US Shop:
ebay.com link: 2x7 14 pin IDC Ribbon Cable 2 54mm pitch 15cm USA Seller Free Shipping

So I hooked up my panels to a Teensy 3.2 with a Smartmatrix shield and tried a couple of F-14 "Second Sortie" type things using the extensions to MPF that Brian put together. These panels are seriously bright, in the photo and video they are dialled down to 50%. Pleased with what I'm seeing. When looking at the photo and video bear in mind I'm no photographer; the panels look *much* better in person. And the photo would have looked better without a cable running across the middle

DSCN5568.JPG

That looks pretty sharp..

that looks awesome. what i especially like is the fact that there is no "block type effect" that you see on current single color led panels.

Awesome. Thank you!

I didn't read through this entire thread, but is the objective to basically make a lower cost full DMD panel replacement that could go into say.. Data East or Williams WPC, etc games even? And if so, awesome!! and what's the current rough cost?

My guess so far would be $40 for the panels, $20 for a Discovery board, $10 for a 5v power supply, maybe $10 or $15 for a commercial use or kit license, and probably $70 or $80 for the DMD signal converter board. So whatever the cost is it should be very close to the current price for plasma DMDs.

I couldn't find the panels for less than $60 shipped now. FYI.

Guilty as charged. I did all this work to do rewrite the layer stack to do all the image processing/compositing on the GPU itself in VRAM, and now for this I have to pull the completed textures back out of the video card so I can send them over the usb/serial interface! That said, we are talking about tiny 128x32 frames, so I /can/ do that, but it still feels gross.

That's just the quick fix, though. Moving forward I'll do this in a smarter way if a color led dmd is present.

Oh, They went up in price quite a bit.

I was looking at some 5V 5A power bricks and saw a few in the $10-$15 range. It will be interesting to see what we ultimately need in terms of power for the panels and the computer board.

According to the spec of the panels and if my math is holding up, if they are driven full white at full brightness (ie, never really in a pinball setup) a 128x32 would pull just over 7A at 5v. You'd likely want to dial down the brightness anyway, at 100% they're too bright for a pinball machine (IMHO). The spec says average consumption of around 3A at 5v. The Teensy power draw is negligible in the scheme of things.

That's the truth about the brightness. Brian had one sitting on display at expo in the far corner of the hall and it was blinding even from half way across the room!

Yeah I viewed Expo like the way TVs have a "showroom" picture setting. I figured "blinding" was the way to draw people in! (And it worked!)

Our experience is that even brightness settings from 50%-100% are barely noticeably different. Gabe had his set to 18% brightness for it to appear to be normal.

What's great about this is that lowering the brightness lowers the power requirements. At 100% brightness I had a 5vdc 10A power supply that couldn't handle it. (When I put up a bright slide it would cut out and I had to power cycle the display to get it back.) I ended up using a 60A(!) power supply for Expo, but I'm assuming all LEDs on full white full brightness will be around 15A. But if you dial down the brightness, you should be fine with a 10A supply (or less).

Did anyone happen to take any pics at the expo with it installed in machine?

You know you love that power supply.

The nice folks in China sent me 2 sets of panels instead of 1, so I tried running them as a 128x64 matrix. Needed to reduce the amount of frames buffered in the Teensy as it ran out of memory, but it seems to run just fine. As usual the crappy picture and video below contain artefacts and "scan lines" that are not actually present when watching directly, so don't take these as how the end product actually looks. I dialled the brightness down to 25% for this.

DSCN5573.JPG

At this size though it's too big to mount in a regular DMD panel cutout, so it's only an option for custom setups.

You owe me a new keyboard, I just spat coffee over this one

so does that mean you can only have 4 colors or is there a way to get more? forgive my newbie question.

someone needs to figure out how to do this for sega large displays.

4 colors per FRAME is already implemented on my STM32. You can switch palettes during gameplay which means more colors.