Airfield - LED lighting for wall hung playfields

[swinks]

grabbed from pinside, not a cheap item but for those that could afford it, a cool one for the games room
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/introducing-airfield-an-led-kit-for-wall-hung-playfields


"Hi guys,

A handful of you may have seen our prototypes at PPE 2012, and I'm happy to announce that Airfield is finally finished. Airfield is an LED kit intended to light up old or spare playfields hung on the wall, making the inserts come alive with the same kind of chase patterns you might see in an attract mode. Most of your questions can be answered by the videos on our site:

http://www.ledseq.com

We've made 100 kits, initially. They cost $299 and will be for sale as soon as we get our store in order (estimated May 6). In the meantime, I invite you to check out our videos and see if it's something you might be interested in (click Help at our site). More importantly, check out our LEDed sequencing tool. We're really proud of how it turned out. It allows you to design and share your light sequences with great speed and flexibility.

Of course, if you have any further questions feel free to ask them here or contact me directly. I hope you guys enjoy the product! It was a lot more work than we anticipated, but the journey was worth it."


a video
[ Invalid YouTube link ]



and some questions answered:


Question / Comment
I would be interested in just a sequencer and power supply, and doing the rest myself to save some coin.

Answer
I'm hearing this a lot over on RGP too. It's definitely worth considering, but keep in mind that the hardware is only designed to drive these LEDs. As you may know, LEDs are extremely sensitive to forward voltage, and can easily burn out if you don't apply the proper resistance. Normal pinball LED bulbs have resistors built-in and expect 6.3V. We output exactly what our LEDs want in conjunction with our matrixing components. So this would certainly be an at-your-own-risk kind of exercise. Still, probably worth pursuing.



Question / Comment
Crickey, not cheap! You guys should have looked into using an arduino or raspberry pi. Could have done this at a fraction of the cost

Answer
Twist: our CPU is an ATMEGA328, otherwise known as... Arduino. But as others have (helpfully!) explained, it's not a simple matter of connecting pins to 72 LEDs. We run additional matrixing hardware to facilitate that, while staying well under 3 watts of power consumption. Besides which, the chips are a very small fraction of the total cost.



Question / Comment
So these LEDs are instant on/off, not faded correct?

Answer
Correct, but like real 90s pinball hardware you can fade the entire matrix at once to any of 16 levels. You can even apply different brightness settings to the main 64 and 8 GI lamps.

Thanks again for the feedback, everyone!




they also have downloadable sequences to save the effort
http://editor.ledseq.com/sequences

[swinks]

I asked the question and on there site you can go through the motions of creating a sequence and save it at there website. This is what he had to say:


The sequencer is ready now, and I'd LOVE for you to try it out. The playfield images are supplied by you, but you can watch the tutorial video (under the help section) to get a full explanation. Here's a link directly to the sequencer:

http://editor.ledseq.com

A little background: when we started the project, we thought we might just require users to write raw sequences in a text editor. In fact, that's what I did for the TAF you see in the videos. Take a look at the output from the tool when you hit download, and hopefully you'll see we made the right decision investing in a proper tool. Once you get the hang of the shortcut keys, you can whip up sequences super fast.

[ddstoys]

That's pretty cool but a bit pricey.     I got a jaycar light chaser board cost about $20 and layed out the leds in the patern i wanted them to flash then added a couple of flashing LEDs to te randoms inserts that didnt have enough Chaser outputs for.