Questions about Airfield LED kit
There is a custom PCB, 38 light cables (each with two LEDs on the end), a microSD card, a roll of Gorilla Tape, and some mounting hardware. The cables connect with a simple “phone style” plug, and you only need to connect as many cables as you need.
Nope, we just include two extra ones in case you need them.
Just a 1/4″ nut driver to mount the PCB to the playfield, and pencil for marking your holes.
Around 320 Milliamps at 6 Volts. We ship with an 6V AC/DC adapter that plugs into the wall.
It is 3.75 feet. If you need it longer, you can use a standard extension cable or extend the barrel jack side using something like this.
The light sequences are stored in a simple text file on the SD card. We’ve designed a beautiful web tool to make this process fun. Revisions are a snap, and you can share your lamp sequences with the world.
That’s easy. Just download this file and use one of the included sequences.
Possibly, but do you really want one? As you probably know, LEDs are extremely sensitive to voltage/current and they must be driven at proper levels or else they will either burn out or lack brightness. Our matrix components are designed for a single LED type throughout the matrix, and we’ve dialed it in for our particular LED specifications. Further, our hardware does not require or support series resistors inline with the LEDs, so attempting to wire our board to commercial pinball LEDs (that all include resistors) is problematic… though 5 Volts to each LED is a possibility. Plus, you’d need to solder your bulbs directly to our PCB or marry them to 6p4c phone cables to use our jacks. If this sounds all good and jolly, contact us and we’ll work something out.
Airfield is completely platform agnostic, so it works on playfields from any manufacturer. It doesn’t use any of the original hardware.
Airfield does have experimental support for daisy chaining multiple boards together, all controlled by a single CPU. This would require custom cables, new firmware, and some clever hacking of our sequencing tool output, but if it’s something you’re interested in we would be happy to work with you to make it happen. We’d actually love to see it.
You can control dynamic brightness in the sequence itself, or you can set a global “Maximum Brightness” that will cap it a certain level. You can also set a speed multiplier that will slow down the light show. These options are good for creating a more subdued environment, and they are explained in the documentation (see below).
We call that the debug switch. If it’s in Diag mode, debug information will be sent over the FTDI pins to a PC running the Arduino IDE. There’s more information in the troubleshooting docs below, but basically if this sounds like Greek to you, just leave it in Play mode. Sequences run a little faster in this mode.
I’ve used this kit from Amazon with good results.