Oh wow this is so impressive!
I am glad to find some more people doing the race leader lights. I just got my led strip (ws2812b) programmed to an Arduino nano. I have it so 61x makes it all green, 51x all blue, 41x all red, 31x rainbow, 21x dancing green, etc. That way each player and even game is easily configurable in the mamehooker ini and you just change the value sent. My test of San Francisco Rush the Rock had the race leader light come on right away. I can send the code here soon if you want to rule out an Arduino code issue or a hardware issue for why your race leader light has a small delay. It took me a while to get it programmed and thankfully gpt4 was very helpful.
What games are you using with race leader lights?
So it turns out, because I am independently connecting the LED strips to different
GPIO pins on the
ESP32, the data voltage for each pin output was too low (sometimes as low as 1.9 volts) so the data line could not send/hold the colours.
I got around this by purchasing a
QuinLED-Dig-Octa System Brainboard and now all LED strips work as expected
https://quinled.info/quinled-dig-octa-brainboard-32-8l/So I'm controlling all LED strips (currently 5) via
WLED and selecting the colours/effects using a
JSON API command. The
WLED JSON API is instant and works really well.
(although teaching myself how to write JSON using curl.exe for Windows has been a little challenging
)
For Example,
RACE LEADER LAMPS: I'm using
MAMEHOOKER to send a ON/OFF (1/0) to an AHK script which sends a
WLED JSON API command to turn ON/OFF the LED strip and set the colour to White.
Once a Game is selected in
BigBox, my GameStart AHK script identifies the player and the game and sends a colour or effect to each particular cabinet's LED strips on game start.
For example,
Sega Racing Classic:
Player 1 is
REDPlayer 2 is
BLUEPlayer 3 is
YELLOW Player 4 is
GREENLater down the track, I'll add a few LED strips around the speakers which will be sound reactive also.
I've got lots of playing around to do with WLED