LED Illuminated Spinner

[JamesTKirk]

Hello. I built a 2P bartop MAME cabinet last year and did a lot of research on illuminated controls. I had a difficult time finding any information on LED illuminated spinners so I crafted my own spinner LED solution out of 2 RGB LEDs that I removed from Ultimarc buttons and an acrylic disk I bought on eBay with the same diameter as the spinner knob. Wanted to post a few pics in case others were interested in doing the same.


The acrylic ring is recessed into the CP and sticks up just a bit to allow the light through. The RGB LEDs are underneath the panel and come through into the acrylic disk recess through small holes at an angle and are secured with epoxy. The surface of the acrylic was scuffed with sandpaper to diffuse the light to reduce hot spotting of the LED.


And with LEDBlinky the spinner LED ring lights up as an indicator only when a game that uses spinner controls is selected from the game menu in MaLA.
It's easy for players to know which games use the spinner and which don't.

[n3wt0n]

Nice job. Looks good.

[EvilNuff]

I like it, well done!

[rackoon]

Very clean, I love it. I might even steal that method on my current build. Thanks for the inspiration.

[fischb]

Did you use the PacLED64?
I am about to do this and I think I might need help with the LED solution for the spinner.  So you could not find an LED-capable spinner?

How about pedals?  I currently have a very cheap 2 pedal USB device that works great for appropriate games.  I think it is designed for people using their PC for dictation.  Anyway, I would line to find and LED solution for that too, so that it flashes to single that the game uses pedals.

[JamesTKirk]

I looked pretty hard for a spinner that lit up and could not find one. I was hoping to find something that lit up like a led ball top joystick.....no dice. 

For my LED spinner ring setup I used the Ultimarc I-pac Ultimate I/O to power the ring LEDs and connect the arcade controls. I connected the 2 spinner ring LEDs to the Ultimate I/O and had LEDBlinky assign them as the spinner/dial port. LEDBlinky now turns them on when a game that uses the spinner/dial is selected.

In my research I noted that the concept of having a pair of LEDs light up a spinner ring is not particularly dependent on the specific brand of hardware controller, in my case the Ultimate I/O. There are several controllers out there that can do this and have the support of software like LEDBlinky. I just chose to build my cabinet out of all Ultimarc controls for simplicity.

Lit pedals is a cool idea. The concept of a MAME cabinet that has LEDs that light the pedals or area near the pedals or even a rectangular piece of recessed plexi on the CP with a pedal symbol as an indicator to the player to use the pedals could totally work. One thing this forum has shown me is that almost anything is possible with the right amount of hardware, software, time and money. 

If you get a LED lit pedal solution working be sure to post it. I want to see it!