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Any advice on how to convert a pinDMD3 to a pin2dmd?


roar

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Without dwelling on the why I would curious to know if anyone would have any advice on what parts I would need to purchase and how I would go about converting my pinDMD3 to a pin2dmd? I hope my led panels and the housing they live in would be reusable.

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Here is a pic of the stm discovery board and the pin2dmd shield. This would replace the pindmd3 board. You wpile also need a 16pin hub75 cable to connect the board to the dmd

 

rev 3.2a GO-DMD set.jpg

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Thanks @gtxjoe, there is a 16pin cable under the pinDMD3 that I suspect I could use. I took a picture of it the controller removed.

35227806012_4fb8e5f1e9_h.jpg

Looks like @unclesash sells the shield and the discovery board at a reasonable price all flashed and ready to go so that may be the easiest route, need to check his shipping costs to Canada.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My new shield and discovery board arrived today!!! Thanks for the fast shipping @UncleSash!

I've sent a donation over to @lucky1 so I can start feeling the PIN2DMD love! I'll post some pictures of what I did to my pinDMD3 to get things up and going when I've got it all working, but so far so easy.

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Well, everything has gone really smoothly. Very easy to setup. The shield and discovery board are considerably larger than the pinDMD3 board and I didn't have room to mount them on my speaker panel so I made a longer ribbon cable and mounted it to the back of my backbox, it looks fine back there and works well.

The pinDMD3 also comes with a crimped power connector that you plug directly into the pinDMD3 board so you need to find another way to run 5V to the DMD panels. I didn't want to cut off the crimped end on my dmd panels so I soldered a male header to a piece of breadboard, ran 5V up from a power supply in the body of my cab and then also attached the 5V required for the shield. I picture would be worth a 1000 words here I'm sure... I'll include one :)

@UncleSash puts the latest firmware on the discovery board for you but naturally within the couple of days it took to ship me my board there was a new version :). Seeing as @UncleSash spells out exactly what you need I had  both a micro and mini usb on hand and was able to update to the latest 2.41 firmware myself quite easily. Again the directions on the pin2dmd site as well as @UncleSash thread make all this very easy.

I updated the dmddevice.dll in my vpinmame directory to use the latest for pin2dmd. I updated my dmddevice.ini to say I was running a pin2dmd now rather than a pindmd3 and my games were up and running.

I can't say enough about the TSPP colour ROM... wow... jaw dropping! That rom alone was worth the trouble of upgrading (Ya I said it, upgrading!) to a pin2dmd. The The other two pin2dmd ONLY roms Shrek and POTC roms on the other hand are not as polished as the TSPP colorization so set expectations accordingly. I also need to give SFII a go too... have to download that table, don't have it yet. I do consider myself down right fierce though so I'll get that soon (SFII joke there).

Anyway... only "issue" i'm dealing with at the moment is an unsatisfactory orange colour for my the rest of my games. It isn't the nice bright "plasma" orange I was getting before with the pindmd3. I read another thread but no suggestions in there have given me the orange I'm looking for. I do recall a change to vpinmame at one point I thought that changed the orange and made it darker... anyway... I'm totally up to having screwed something up on my end to cause this, just not sure what it is yet.

Major thanks to @UncleSash for the super fast shipping and help with the shield and board and of course big thanks to @lucky1. Really glad to have a pin2dmd in my cabinet, looking forward to trying to spend some time with the editor now and seeing if I can contribute to the colour rom scene. This would have been easier to spend some time with if I wouldn't have gotten accepted to the pinballfx3 beta... that is now stealing cycles :) Thanks again!

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Have problem with orange too.

Only solution i find is to put dim klirit (dont know how you call that material) in front of panel.

But it must be dark brown dim, not black.. Brightnes is almost at max. and RGB is 255/105/0. on one type of panels. Second type i have is 255/75-80/0,

First i try 2mm klirit it was ok.. But with 5mm dots look much smother (like on real plasma) there is no edge seen on pixels.

 

By the way,

Taking 5V strait from power board is not best solution, specialy on wpc games. 5V regulator is already runing on its maximum. When you ad led panels with white on whole display and brightnes at max it would surtenly reset. Better idea is to take it from 12V unregulated and ad dc-dc convertor. See rapelbox displays he use it too.

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Have problem with orange too.

Only solution i find is to put dim klirit (dont know how you call that material) in front of panel.

But it must be dark brown dim, not black.. Brightnes is almost at max. and RGB is 255/105/0. on one type of panels. Second type i have is 255/75-80/0,

First i try 2mm klirit it was ok.. But with 5mm dots look much smother (like on real plasma) there is no edge seen on pixels.

 

By the way,

Taking 5V strait from power board is not best solution, specialy on wpc games. 5V regulator is already runing on its maximum. When you ad led panels with white on whole display and brightnes at max it would surtenly reset. Better idea is to take it from 12V unregulated and ad dc-dc convertor. See rapelbox displays he use it too.



In Roars case, is it a V-Pin with 5V from a good PC power Supply. No worries about power from the WPC board ;-)
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2 hours ago, Sibi said:

Have problem with orange too.

Only solution i find is to put dim klirit (dont know how you call that material) in front of panel.

But it must be dark brown dim, not black.. Brightnes is almost at max. and RGB is 255/105/0. on one type of panels. Second type i have is 255/75-80/0,

First i try 2mm klirit it was ok.. But with 5mm dots look much smother (like on real plasma) there is no edge seen on pixels.

 

By the way,

Taking 5V strait from power board is not best solution, specialy on wpc games. 5V regulator is already runing on its maximum. When you ad led panels with white on whole display and brightnes at max it would surtenly reset. Better idea is to take it from 12V unregulated and ad dc-dc convertor. See rapelbox displays he use it too.

Thanks @Sibi, I am on a virtual pin and running the +5V from a PC Power Supply that should have lots of power 400W power supply, 48A on the +5V rail. I do have that 5V also powering the 5V required for my pinscape boards but I think I should still be alright... if I experience resets that +12V rail on the PSU is not being used at all so I could go that route.

Thank you also for the RGB values, I will give this a go too... I really don't want to put a 'gel' in front of the DMD, I know the panels are capable of producing an orange I like as the pindmd3 was doing it but I'll tinker a bit. I will post a picture of the same ROM, one with the pindmd3 and one with the pin2dmd this weekend using the same ribbon cable so I can rule out any of the mods I made as the culprit.

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This is a picture of my install... if you are adverse to bad hack jobs then you may not want to look :) I tend to be able to get things to work, they just aren't always the prettiest!

35497731281_832e0798e4_h.jpg

 

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My orange issue...

I will grab better screenshots this weekend, I want to do a more controlled test between the pindmd3 and pin2dmd, same rom, same sequence, and also to ensure I didn't screw anything up in my install but I had these two shots on my camera.

PIN2DMD - Orange

35497732511_9e6dbaf90f_h.jpg

PINDMD3 Orange

35497728071_792fe3b322_b.jpg

 

 

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1 hour ago, roar said:

Thank you also for the RGB values, I will give this a go too... I really don't want to put a 'gel' in front of the DMD, I know the panels are capable of producing an orange I like as the pindmd3 was doing it but I'll tinker a bit. I will post a picture of the same ROM, one with the pindmd3 and one with the pin2dmd this weekend using the same ribbon cable so I can rule out any of the mods I made as the culprit.

Im not talking about gel, klirit is kind of plastic. Williams use it in some real pinball in front of display, but of course not dim.

https://www.galenikaklirit.co.rs/ploce.html 

 

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2 hours ago, Thalamus said:

Thank you roar for this info. You just went for it while I'm still sitting on the fence ;)

So, is this going to become a "standard upgrade kit"  ? And as as norwegian, I should be looking at the german shop ?

I've got to wonder if it is going to become the standard upgrade. Right now the only thing pinDMD3 users are really missing out on are TSPP and SFII... the other roms in my opinion aren't worth the effort... and I believe freezy is capable of getting both of those working on a pinDMD3 with an update to his dmddevice.dll. With all that being said though I grew tired of the lack of support for the pinDMD3 in general. Initially there were talks of an editor that would be easier to use but it never materialized. I figured I might as well support the folks who are actively moving this scene forward.

I now need to go find out why my pin2dmd keeps forgetting that it is registered.

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  • 4 months later...
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[mention=11434]vlgxejme[/mention] OK, to upgrade you System, follow this steps:

  1. 1st step:

    - unplug the 16 pin ribbon cable from the PCB!

  2. 2nd step:

    - connect the ribbon cable to the HUB75 on your V4 Shield!

  3. 3rd step:

    - connect +5V DC to this screw Terminal like it is labeld!

    - in this pic:

    - left (next to the nucleo): GND

    - right (on the outside): +5V DC

  4. 4th step:

    - connect a micro USB cable to this USB port and you PC, to hook up you Pin2DMD.

    - Maybe follow install instruction on the www.Pin2dmd.com side for drive installation!

  5. additional step: for a Firmware update, connect a micro USB cable to this port (I have all the time both ports connected) and your PC.

    Then follow the FW Upgrade instruction on www.pin2dmd.com

 

5a03af3795106_pindmd3pcbtoPin2DMDV4.thumb.JPG.e2d4affc035f5e184364dfb1d95332b0.JPG

for a longer 16 PIn IDC cable, check this ebay link:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/12-Female-to-Female-16-Pin-IDC-Connector-Rainbow-Color-Flat-Ribbon-Cable/351117396361?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

regards

Sascha

 

 

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