Homebrew Pinball #3, Part 68

Cross posted from the original Pinside thread, this is one of many posts regarding my third homebrew pinball machine, creatively nicknamed 'P3'



Still working on a bunch of stuff so I don't actually have any top side pictures yet but..... light!

The funny side effect of just trailing a light strip around the playfield is actually looks cool underneath too.

I ended up using 126 LEDs worth of 30/m strip to reach all ~30 inserts on the playfield. Besides from a few places where I didn't plan for lights and had too many mechs in the way, it was pretty easy to mount the strip over the the holes. The budget pack of clips I found are a bit too big, so there's still a bit of back and forth play, but I don't think there'll be enough movement to cause any issues.

I hooked the strip up to a dedicated 5v line+fuse coming from my ATX PSU, and it seems to be lighting fine with just that power coming in at one end (I was sorta expecting needing to provide more power somewhere along the length), even with all the lights on (which will never happen in practice). I had to make another little adapter board for my RPi-powered MPU to add in a 3V - 5V level shifter since the RPi only puts out 3V, but that seems to be fine for driving the whole strip, with an added 4ft of wire between the board and the beginning of the strip. Time will tell whether the electrical noise interferes with the lights once everything is playing, but hopefully they'll be okay (plus I plan to refresh them at 30Hz so any glitches should clear up quick).

Posted Tuesday, November 16, 2021
at 11:20 AM


Tags: Blog Post, Pinball, Project, P3,


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