Info – TILT!Audio

Board rev 3.8 with Arduino

The new board rev comes with a dedicated place for a co-processor (arduino mini pro) to control various extension.

Fully assembled it looks like this

Fully assembled rev 3.8 board with arduino mini pro as co-processor and low noise amps

Arduino attached with 4 pins minimal, plus programming header

The arduino is connected with minimal 4 pins: Vcc, Gnd, SDA, SCL. Also the UART (RX,TX,Vcc,GND) on the left side has a header attached for programming. You can program the arduino “on board” but you either need to power the 5V from the machine and connect only TX, RX and Gnd or you also connect Vcc from the programming adapter (USB-to-Serial TTL) but then you need to disconnect the power from the board and also better remove the raspberry pi (board will be supplied by 5V from the adapter, which is okay for STM and DAC, but PI would be to much).

New Revision 3.5 – 3.7

What’s new

The most important change since the latest release: the annoying “sound interface error” with some WPC machines (TAF, STTNG, …) is now gone!

The old discrete decoder hardware build based on 3 smd logic chips was replaced by a STM32F4 micro controller module. This way the micro controller can talk to the game, avoiding the “sound interface error” and also takes over the command decoding.

There some more advantages with this new design:

no more jumper. Data east input or wpc input is recognized automatically
no more smd soldering. The new mcu module is normal through hole.
no need for analog digital converter (for old style data east pot). The STM32 takes over this task as well.
no need for pull up resistors networks. The STM32 has internal pull ups.
no decoupling caps for smd needed.

All in all there are 10 pieces less to solder and replaced by one STM32 module (plus one resistor).

Other improvements

Additionally there is an extended connector for the OLED display (was already on rev 3.1) that can be used with both types of OLEDs (either GND left or Vcc left). Depending on your OLED type you need to use the upper or lower row to connect.

MCU with soldered headers
STM32F4 module
Bare rev 3.5 baord
Rev 3.5 with STM32F4
Totally assembled for DE&WPC

More changes

The HF filtering at the amplifier outputs are now optional. Only a very few user were ever effected by that. So you could still assemble the 6 impedance filter and caps if you like, but the parts will no longer be included in the kits. Instead you need to bridge the L1 – L6 with a wire (or solder jumper).

A word on sound

Many questions these days are about sounds and the fine grained setup you can do with TILT!Audio.

First of all there are 2 types of sound packs:

Old style in directories
Altsound: all in one directory together with a csv table.

Features of both formats are slightly different, but mostly one can categorize sound effects in:

background music (or simply music)
voice callouts (or just voice)
special effects (or just sfx)
jingles (play over a music and music continues)
singles (play once and terminate the playing music)

In addition to that there’s volume control that balanced the volume of music, sfx, voice, jingle and single.

Gain

First there is a gain, that allows to raise or lower volume level for each sound effect. Normal level is 50, but it can be adjusted from 1 to 100.

So if some sound effect seem to be too low, you can just go to the web UI and raise the gain.

Here is one difference between directory sound packs and altsound packs:

While in both cases each sound effect has its individual gain, the directory style also has a default for a category: gain by type!

So if you want to raise volume level for voice in general, just use the sliders GainByType in the webUI