Space Base - A homebrew ICB/ZP

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eds1275:
Hey Thanks guys!

I absolutely would love to, however priority for me currently is getting a space to live that is my own. I currently have an awful 7x9 foot bedroom for privacy, and shared everything else with a friend and her army of children. I need to get out!!!!

ids:
Just wanted to add... created a few boards at them cheapo fab plants across the ocean

This is to drive the segmented display. I created an almost identical one without the column driver bits (stuff on the left, the last shift register and transistors) to drive the RGB's behind the holes:

And one for the segmented displays themselves. Sadly these are no longer available and I'm not sure if similar units can be found.

Earlier post shows the one which mounts on the KL25z as well. With a few wires and solder, it all comes together fairly easily.

Someone who knows electics may laugh, but I think I did ok for not knowing this stuff. And it seems to work, no fires so far :)

gerber files upon request. (I do have a couple spare units, but a set is going to Le Chuck and a set on reserve for eds....) Created using DesignSpark - those files, again, available on request.

Eds, man, wish you the best, you deserve it

Le Chuck:
That is so ridiculously cool, can’t wait to get my set so I can’t have to solder all that from scratch!

ids:
Thought I'd fill in some more details and provide a pictorial view of the progress from early days to now....

This began a while back with a lot of breadboard. You can see the sd card which held audio files from Eds, the KL25z micro, etc. Just above the speaker, small chip is a simple audio amp. The LED's are simulating the hole lights (and were used to convey debug info). On the right, a long row of switches to simulate the hole switches. Somewhere in that mess of wires are switches to simulate the joysticks. So glad to have moved off the breadboard. This is before Le Chuck shipped the playfield and related components.

Once stuff arrived, I used a dremel and appropriate bit to create a groove to bury wires in, mounted the mag-switches and connected it all. I later used a hot glue gun to hold it all in place. I ran the wires upwards to exit at the top as it seemed easiest and least likely to get in the way of the ball.

Next up is installing the 5mm RGB LED's. Again, using ribbon cable here - with 30 lines to connect, it was a natural fit, and lets us use standard 34 pin 2 row floppy-cable style connectors and cabling.

I don't seem to have pics handy... limit switches were added to the back of the beast, triggered by the metal block things that hold the ends of the bar. These are all tied to interrupts, so we can immediately stop the motors. At the bottom, they are at different heights. This is to work the exit-gate mechanism properly, and it also helps the ball exit fully onto the bar. In early testing I found that if we allowed the user to move the bar up at the instant the ball was no longer detected at the gate, the ball could get pushed back in, or jam in the gate, etc. So an angled bar and a delay in the code makes for a fine solution.

With that in place, it was time to get off the breadboard and get serious. To drive the RGB LED's we have our first board full of TLC5916 chips. It was not fun pulling apart the ribbon cable, stripping, soldering, and then trying to figure out why some LED's didnt light up at first... Ugh

Then to translate 10 hole switches to the minimal input pins on the micro, we have the CD40147. For this I crimped some ribbon cable and used the connectors you see here. 10 inputs, pull-ups, 4 outputs, power....

Since the motors have 3-pin female connectors, the best way to deal with power and signal was to create a simple board to bring it all together:

The display, this one was not fun to solder. I stripped some cables to run across the rows of seg. units, and some to run the common lines for columns. You can see wire exposed at regular intervals here - this is to connect to the same pin on each display unit across a row. Getting all that soldering into tight spots was challenging, and I never did complete it all in the end. I sent the partially complete bit to a brave man who said he could wrap it up, but perhaps might change his mind when I ship the fabbed board his way.

Even with these boards in place, the rats nest of wires everywhere drove me nuts, and every once in a while, something got loose and things didn't work quite right and I'd forget which wire went where or to which pin of the micro, and troubleshooting was less fun than making progress... So I thought I'd make my own boards - both to pretty things up, and to make it so that in 10 years, if there is a need to disconnect and reconnect things, I won't need to find a manual, it will just fit. At first I tried the toner transfer method method but could not get the toner to transfer well enough. I picked up a mini CNC to etch them, but had z issues and ruined a bunch of copper (I will eventually resolve this one). In the end, the easiest thing to do was send boards off for fabbing - this was a new experience and one I've come to like, the results are something I am mostly happy with. (I say "mostly" because this was a learning experience, I could have done things a little better, they works fine... live and learn)

Hole lights driver:

display driver - sorry, blurry pic and missing the caps and stuff but gives you the idea. Even tho we are driving only 5 columns, I broke out a spot for a sixth (had the room), and the remain 2 outputs of the shift register are available, as is the shifted data-out from it, so this board, in theory, could drive 8 columns, and be chained to other shift registers off board (see, I'm learning... :) ).

The microcontroller "hat" (or whatever the cool kids are calling them these days). Here I also broke out some extra power connects, both 5V and 3.3V (and gnd of course). Using arduino style stackable headers lets this pop right onto the micro, and still expose all lines for whatever you may want to use it for in the future. Dips let you customize some bits of the game without the need to find a way to write updates to the config file on the SD card mounted in the R-Pi (e.g. difficulty level)

And display... for this I designed the board to hold all 10 display units, even tho the game calls for 9 (you can leave any spots blank). I've lit all segments in one column here:

I think that does it for my contributions here, unless anyone has a question. The software side doesn't have any nice pics, so... guess I'm done. I imagine Le Chuck will continue to post the proper sort of build progress type of stuff we've all become accustomed to

Le Chuck:
Y’all don’t even realize how next level this is. Build your own boards!! Dayumm

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