Arduino DMD Controller

Controlling a pinball plasma dot matrix display with an Arduino I/O board. Blog post on how this was done (including source code): http://imtzo.net/blog/2009/12/arduino-pinball-dmd/

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• arduino
• pinball
• dmd
• project

[ytgentry]

Is the horrible flashing visible in real life?

[imtzo]

No, that's an artifact of the difference in frame/scan rate between the camera and DMD.

[imtzo]

@coondogtheman1234: The DMD only takes a digital signal, so you'd have to create something that would read the composite video and convert it to 128x32 pixels grayscale, and then 'render' it back out to the DMD.

[NardDogz]

As a project I've been thinking about finding a way to add digital sound effects to my old electomechanical Solar City pinball machine.

This Arduino with the adafruit waveshield might just be the ticket. I'd have to find a way to tap into the game for input signals without hacking up the Gottlieb factory wiring.

[Maxxarcade]

I would love to build one of those controllers. I have tons of DMD's that need bench testing, and I've been searching for a way to drive one with a PC to no avail.

[coondogtheman1234]

can youi feed a standard composite video signal into this display and have it show it on the screen, like hook a video game system to the input of the controller and have the video game be shown on the screen, do a video on that

[caguitar99999]

does the display have all the multiplexers, registers, etc? are you using the arduino as a data train, or does the arduino actually do the multiplexing? i'd really love to know how you pulled this off..