Heiwa "Bull" Upgrade
OK, so now that we've had the Heiwa "Bull" here for several months, and put the Yamato Revival beside it, I decided it was time to add the modification I'd seen Carl Wegman do to one he had at one point. Carl was kind enough to send me the Arduino project file so I could get started on it. Plus, a nice fat order of parts from Digikey so I could do several other projects that I'd already had in mind.
I decided to do a couple of things different from his build. The first was dispensing with the Arduino board and project shield that he used, instead opting to build the circuit outside of that. So to make sure I knew where everything needed to go, I opted to drop the loaded microcontroller onto a prototyping breadboard for testing purposes. The other thing I decided to do was to wire up a power indicator board, simply four "always on" LEDs so I know if I need to turn it off.
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With that working just fine, I transferred the circuit over to PCB. The core of the system was built up onto one of Evil Mad Science's ATMega business card target boards. I used connectors and headers to join the lighting boards up. Unfortunately, I found out that I need to remove the machine's bezels first, it turned out the plastic runs down to the playfield, so I had to do some dremeling to fit the wires, trim my PCBs down, and the payout light sequence I had to completely rebuild off PCB. Plus, I found out why Carl had deleted two LEDs from the payout sequence, I had to lop the domes off the LEDs in the power indicator so that I could fit them into the green window, which had less space than the other spots. The payout area was taped from the back. The other indicators were hot glued into place.
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The core board installed. Notice the two buttons that serve as "test if the machine's switches are still working", as well as the other headers for the machine switches. The whole thing runs off a 5V RadioWack wall wart.
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As one last bit, I replaced my red LED in the payout "window" with two white LEDs attached to the first two lines of the payout sequence. Yes, I used hot glue.
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Looks good!
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And an animated GIF of the result.
This has also (mostly) fixed the problem I was having with the payout light not really firing, since the payout lights are no longer dependent on the actual status of the switch. Now, the switch merely instructs it to begin the light sequence, and after that it doesn't care until it's done running the sequence.
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