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TILT!Audio controls rgb led rings

With the new lua scripting support you can do “magic things” like control rgb led rings with the sound your machine is playing. Don’t believe it, just watch the video:

How does it work?

There’s 5 pieces you need to plug together:

  1. An arduino mini pro (5V 16Mhz) that controls the leds rings.
  2. Some leds rings (or other 2812 based rgb led strips from alibaba.com)
  3. TILT!Audio board 2.5f or newer that exposes the i2c bus.
  4. init.lua script on the tilt audio sd card for some convinience
  5. Arduino sketch to control the leds.

The sketch and the lua snippet can be found on github: https://github.com/sker65/tiltaudio-extensions

In order to program the arduino mini you need an FTDI usb to serial adapter (best is switchable between 3V3 and 5V). Arduino IDE to compile should be easy to manage, just ask goole there’s a lot of tutorials about that.

Then connect the led rings data pin is pin 4 (but this is configurable in the sketch).

Finally connect the i2c wires SDA, SLC (its a4/a5 on the arduino mini) plus GND and 5V from TILT!Audio board to the Arduino and you ready to play.

Be careful with the power consumption of the leds in my example its already 32 leds with 32*3*20mA = 1,9A when all are bright white. This would of course be already to much for the 5V output on the TILT!Audio board.

So if you add extra light in your pinball game, also add an extra power supply.

New firmware 1.28 with port extender is out

New firmware 1.28 is out: https://mega.nz/#!l4xyDI5I!qoBXKPpOlxKabubys3AqH6tNBpEhtj0eJvP5bU4uTSY

It has a few bugfixes and especially support for the port extender (with board rev 2.5f and newer)

To use extension port you simply can reuse the serialCmd field in the sound effect details. New 1.28 recognized a few additional commands: 
1. all commands for the serial media server (like before): PLAY, STOP und PLAYONEOF 
2. NEW commands for the port extender: PORT x ON, PORT x OFF oder PORTSEQ x n1 n2 n3 …

You can also combine both comamnd types in one, just use a colon as separator. X is the placeholder for the port number with the range 100-115 -> 16 outputs. The n1, n2 … values are timespans of milli seconds, in order to playback a sequence. The port pin then toggles on and off.

There is also a new settings page in the web ui, that allows for testing GPIOs and commands in general: 

With this testing page you can check and test your installation wihtout playing the actual sound effect.

TILT!Audio on my MSF game

I finally took the time this evening and put one of my spare TILT!Audio boards into my msf game. Took only a few minutes to replace and it plays very nice.

My msf has a few more mods like extra leds in backbox speakers, big color pin2dmd and also the whole gi is rgb. But to be honest the biggest thrill is always the new sound. Of course I replaced the speakers as well to get more volume and clearer sound.