9/29/2017 – Open source is open source

This has come up again, and when people start yelling about others, it gets me a little angry.  Think of this blog post as another one of those where I’m just complaining.  It is only tangentially related to pinball, but it irks me so here we go.

I’m a big proponent of open source.  Why?  Because open source tools have enabled me to create a bunch of great things.  Things that would not have been possible without open source.  Let’s go over the tools that I use most days in my life:  gcc, linux, python, eclipse,  and millions of others.  That list doesn’t include many subprojects like kicad, gimp, audacity, etc.  That fails to mention open standards such as c, c++, IP, UDP which makes our world go around.  I guess that I’m not just talking about open source, but transparency and open standards.

Everything that I have produced for the Open Pinball Project (OPP) is under the GPLv3 license.   Why is that license important to me, and why not simply release the stuff as un-copyrighted?  An un-copyrighted work can be used by everyone (That’s good).  Here is the important distinction.  If you base your project off a GPLv3 project, it also most be released into the public domain.  This is referred to as copyleft.  Anything that is derived from the original GPLv3 copyrighted material must also be available for others derive further works.

So anyone can take anything in the OPP repository and use it for their own purposes.  The only stipulation that I really care about, is that if they do that, and make improvements, those improvements most also be available publicly so others can easily get the improvements and new works.  That ends up helping to increase the quality of the software or hardware in the future.

So why did I release it with that particular license?  OPP is months of hard work.  Maybe even years.  I have no idea how much time I have spent on it over the last 10 or 15 years.  I want others to be able to leverage my work so that they can learn from it, extend it, and generally use anything that they find useful.

I take copyrights very seriously.  Here is a strange fact that most people don’t know.  If you use the OPP pinball framework, sound can be either place in the sounds folder, or the sounds/copyright subfolder.  If it is in the copyright subfolder, it should not be saved to the repository and should simply exist on the physical machine.  For the Van Halen pinball machine, there are many Van Halen/Hagar songs that are played in the background.  That’s all copyrighted material, so I don’t have the rights to put that in the repository.  If the framework can’t find the sound file, and it is supposed to be in the copyrighted folder, it plays a standard sound clip stating “that is copyrighted”.

At one point a few years back, people were complaining that others were using their work in ways that it wasn’t meant.  I believe MPF (mission pinball framework) was originally branched from PROC work that Gerry, Mike, and some others did.  I think this was in regards to MPF supporting multiple pieces of hardware.  Don’t complain about that.  Feel honored that your hard work is getting new life and others are benefiting from using it.  That is the point of open source.  It allows others to use your sweat and tears and make something better than what you ever imagined.

People aren’t “stealing” your work…they are extending it.  Imitation is the highest form of flattery.  If you don’t want others to use your work, don’t release it as open source software/hardware/whatever.  Keep it closed and locked away, and I really do feel that your stuff will suffer when an open source solution comes along.  The reason that so many people use the PROC platform is because it is relatively open, and it has a well defined interface.  It has a skeleton framework that others can use to create their own projects.

So why did I get on this rant?  Strangely it is because of Ben Heck.  Ben Heck and Mike from HomePin are having a little tiff.  The PinHeck system I believe was released under the Creative Commons – Share Alike (CC-SA) license.  (That holds many of the same copyleft attributes as GPLv3).  It seems that Mike, or people working for Mike, may have based some of his designs on the PinHeck system.

So a couple quick points.  Under that license you must attribute the original design in some way.  Yada, yada, this is based on such and such.  Regardless of the license, that is the right thing to do.  If that is what happened, just fess up Mike and say it.  There is nothing illegal and lock stock and barrel copying that design and using it for your own purpose because it was released under CC-SA.  Any fixes that he made to the design, he must publish them because it is a copyleft license.

So, I assume when Ben caught wind of this, he pulled the files from the server.  I haven’t looked lately if they are there.  The CC-SA license is irrevocable.  You can’t simply say, sorry, I now don’t want it to be open to the public.  Once open source, it is always open source.  The legal ramifications would be impossible to reconcile since others by design could have based their works on your work.

Pulling things off the server is absurd.  Once on the internet, it is always on the internet.  There is a project called the internet archive that lets you go back in time and find things that people have posted on the internet and then removed.  Even though Ben has removed the content, it is still out there.  I have all the design/art files that Ben posted for America’s Most Haunted (AMH).  They were put out there so others could extend his work and make mods and toppers.  They could even build another AMH if they wanted to spend the time.  They are still readily available on the internet archive.

So that gets me to the last point.  Ben mentioned Charlie caught wind of someone trying to build another AMH.  Maybe it was me, maybe it was somebody else.  The truth is I actually considered it.  Charlie, Ben, you can rest assured, that I have no desire to make an AMH from scratch.  That being said, it would be a technically interesting project, but I don’t feel it is worth the time or effort.

I’m still hoping for somebody to create a completely open source pinball machine from scratch.  Maybe in the next 10 years.

If anybody has more details on the origins of MPF, why Ben pulled the art files, etc, that is more correct, I will be happy to fix the above post or post corrections.  Most of this is third or forth hand information that I’ve gleaned from the internet so it is not very reliable.

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9/21/2017 – Updated NeoPixel Library

This is the first step in a multi step process to update how NeoPixels are dealt with in the OPP framework.  This is going to be pretty techy centric, so I apologize in advance.  (Truth be told, I really have no idea who reads this blog, so maybe those two people like techy topics.  I just don’t know).

The original implementation of lighting NeoPixels using the PSoC used a SPI bus to create the protocol.  A single bit sent to a NeoPixel is a waveform which is high for 417ns, low or high depending on if the bit is 1 or 0 for the next 417ns, and low for the last 417ns.  If you add these 3 portions of the waveform together, a single bit takes 1.25 us to send.  The SPI bus is one of the simplest buses.  To send a 1, it sends a high for a clock cycle.  To send a 0, it sends a low for a clock cycle.  If I set the clock of the SPI so a full clock cycle is 417ns, I can have the hardware send a bit stream at the correct rate.  There is one problem.  Instead of sending a single bit, I have to send the framing portion of the protocol, so I end up sending 1×0.  (If I want to send a 1, I send 110.  If I want to send a 0, I send 100.  Simple).  Here’s the problem.  Making 3 bits out of 1 bit kind of stinks because it keeps crossing byte boundaries and such.  Really quite annoying.

One way to reduce this annoyance is to just store everything as 3 bits in RAM.  That means that each Neopixel requires 9 bytes (24 bits/Neopixel * 3 = 72 bits or 9 bytes).  As mentioned in the last post, the PSoC 4200 only has 4K of RAM, so that disappears pretty fast.

Another way is to generate the framing on the fly.  So every time that a bit is sent to a NeoPixel it is pre-pended with a 1 and post-pended with a 0.  This takes much more processing time, but saves RAM.  (This was the original implementation, and the code that contains all the bit shifts and boundary checking is magnificent.  Completely unreadable).

Neither of these solutions are optimal.  (Heck, they all really kind of stink).  Enter the little PLD that is part of the PSoC 4200.  Why not create a little state machine to pull bytes from a FIFO and create the framing in hardware.  That way, the processor doesn’t have to do any of the bit banging stuff.  As an added bonus, the PSoC has internal FIFOs that can be set for either 24 bits (RGB Neopixels) or 32 bits (RGBW Neopixels).  In that way, the processor just has to keep the FIFO from under-flowing and can use a single write to send a complete NeoPixel update value.  Very clean.

At this point, I’ve created a library that does all the NeoPixel heavy lifting with the state machine included and an interrupt to keep the FIFO from under-flowing.  In the OPP code, I will simply pre-allocate 3 bytes for every NeoPixel in memory, then as MPF or whatever framework wants to update the value of a NeoPixel, it just has to send the index, and the new value.  At this point I’ve just finished the library, and with the previous NeoPixel incarnation, I had already set up commands to change NeoPixel values.  I might update those commands to be less restrictive.

Using this library, the load on the processor should be as small as possible using the PSoC4.  Only thing that would be better is to buy a PSoC5 and set up a DMA to fill the FIFO.  That would mean the updates could happen without any processor intervention at all except for starting the DMA.

Here is a link to the Cypress question, and the final library solution that I posted.  Since I’m going to integrate it into the OPP firmware, there is probably little reason to click this link, but it does have the library.  Cypress Developer Community Link

8/30/2017 – Arduino revisited one more time

So things have been rather quiet at OPP central right now.  Got back from Pintastic, and I’ve basically done no real pinball related things.  I kinda miss it since I was spending so much time for a while.  Nobody is even posting on the BPA (Boston Pinball Association) except for the random machine for sale here or there.  Pinside has also been rather dull, but that is probably because I don’t know what threads are interesting.  There are some small email exchanges going on, but even those are mostly short and to the point.

So, pondering one evening, I thought to myself that I should create an Arduino shield since so many people use that platform.  As you’ve all read before, I hate the Arduino framework, but I actually thought that I liked the base processors a lot.  The one guy mentioned that I could simply program everything in C and ignore all the “helpful” classes that get rid of all the dirty nastiness of the processor.  (Of course that dirty nastiness is what allows you to squeeze so much performance out of these little processors).  My original thought is because it has more I/O it would be easier for people to use it in a centralized way.

Anyhow, last weekend, I started to do the base research of the feasibility and the value of creating such a shield.  So below I will do a little bit of a comparison with the PSoC 4200 that currently use for the OPP wings, and the Arduino Mega.

1. Cost – PSoC $4, Mega $8.45 on Ebay.  The Arduino is more than twice as much.  This is buying off Ebay and trying to find the cheapest source.  If you went aliexpress you could get it for about $7, but I have never bought off aliexpress, so fear of the unknown factors in that a little bit.  You can probably assume about a 30 day wait if you buy from aliexpress.  PSoC is the winner here.
2. I/O Pins – Mega 54, PSoC 36.  The mega definitely has more I/Os.  That makes it very attractive and probably why I started doing this exercise.  It was difficult for me to figure out the data sheet and find how many are dedicated I/Os versus general purpose I/Os.  I think that is mostly because the Arduino framework wants to configure certain pins to certain functions so people can create generic shields.  For a pinball controller, you mostly want raw inputs and outputs.  Some PWMs would be great also if they could be routed to the correct pins.  PSoC has 36 pins which 32 are generic I/Os, leaving 2 pins for communications (Tx/Rx), plus 2 more pins.  For me it is really the sweet spot of I/Os.  I can send a 4 byte (32 bit) value back to the host that gives the state of all the inputs.  At 54, I would probably choose to send back a 6 byte (48 bit) value back to the host.  That would make the host code a little more sticky.  Regardless, more is always better, so Arduino is the winner.
3. Voltage – PSoC 5V, Mega 5V.  I like 5V I/O more than 3.3V and both processors support it.  At 5V you have more choices of MOSFETs so that is all good.  Interfacing to a Pi is more difficult, but level shifters are pretty easy to work with in this day and age.
4. Flash – Mega 256K, PSoC 32K.  Mega has much more flash.  In the latest version of the OPP firmware, it is using approximately 70% of the flash of the PSoC.  If I had more codespace, I’m not sure what I would do with it.  I’m guessing the Mega needs more flash because of the Arduino framework.  That is not a big selling point to me as mentioned before.  Arduino is clearly the winner.
5. SRAM – Mega 8K, PSoC 4K.  Once again, Mega has more resources including SRAM.  (Places where you store variables in your code, stack and heap).  The OPP original project worked with a processor that had 8K of flash, and 512 bytes for RAM.  (That included a bootloader that took 768 bytes of flash).  Again, Arduino is clearly the winner, but since I have enough resources, it doesn’t matter that much.
6. Processor Frequency – PSoC 48 MHz, Mega 16 MHz.  OK, this is one parameter that I do care about.  With the addition of switch matrix support, the processor is starting to need to do much more processing.  With the PSoC it has plenty of headroom and I don’t worry about things like updating LEDs, sending responses to the host, reading the switch matrix, and firing solenoids all at the same time.  The running loop happens so quickly, that all of these things can happen within that loop time.  At 16 MHz, I’m not so certain.  When trying to decide whether to make an Arduino shield, this was the nail in the coffin for me.   PSoC is clearly the winner.

There is an Arduino Due.  It has the same number of I/Os, but changes the processor to 3.3V.  It has even more flash (512K) and RAM (96K), and it is running at 84MHz.   It also costs about $12.50.  As a processor, that is interesting.   As a pinball controller, it is just seems a little expensive to me.  (Going into this, I thought I was going to find an equivalent part to the PSoC at about $6 in the Arduino world, but I just haven’t found it.)

I’m glad I took the time to learn more about the Arduinos, and do a little bit of research.  At this point, the idea is going back onto the shelf until the prices drop a little further.  I might ask for an Arduino Due for Christmas, just to play with it, but that’s what it is going to end up being, one more toy in the basement in a box.

7/14/2017 – Youtube videos of talk available

If anybody is really bored this weekend, here are the videos of the talk that I gave on pinball electronics.  Goes from EM machines to what I call Gen3 machines.  Those who couldn’t make it to Pintastic 2017 might be interested.

I forgot to mention the total cost of the Van Halen machine.  All said and done, it cost about $480 to make it a reality.  That included everything from the base non-working Dolly machine to the two cards that I blew up and replaced because I kicked out the ground plug.

Without further adieu, here are the videos.  (It was broken into 3 separate files by the camera, and I don’t know how to join them together, so sorry about that.)

Look, it’s Dave Marston as the thumbnail!

 

7/12/2017 – Pintastic 2017, Now it is over

Pintastic 2017 has come and gone.  I am as happy to see it gone as can be.  Too much stuff trying to be forced into a small period of time.  It was all done.  Some could have been done better, but, everything was done.  Here is a quick run down:

Drove there Friday morning and met up with Dave Marston.  Made sure that he had my presentation, and we could display it on the screen.  That all went well.  Met with John C.(originator of pinball night back when I lived in CT), and we started the unload of the machines.  After about an hour and a half, both machines were set up in the free play hall.  That’s when I noticed an issue…I had forgotten to bring the boom box topper for Van Halen…

You can’t have a music pin without having any speakers, so it was back into the car to drive an hour each way to grab the topper from my house.  Doh!  My own fault for making sure all the machines were in the car, but not doing a final walk through to see if I had missed anything.

We got back to Pintastic at noon and finally got the machine all together.  One issue with Pintastic is that the free play room is amazingly loud.  Ear splitting loud.  My kids don’t want to go to Pintastic because it is so loud in the main room.   In my basement, the speakers are so loud on the pins, that I only turn the amplifiers up to about 1/4 power.  At Pintastic, I needed to turn the amplifiers the whole way up, and the call outs could not be heard clearly over the din.

Back to the machines.  Van Halen was running perfectly, but SharpeShooter was having issues with one of the solenoid cards.  After an hour, I finally traced it to the fact that the high power ground for that card wasn’t working properly.  I could have tried to jumper the wire to another ground wire, but then I pulled out the molex connector and squeezed it slightly.  That was enough to make the connection, and everything was working properly.  These are the standard molex connectors used for PC power supplies where the connector on the board is a pin, and the wires from the playfield surround that pin.  I have never seen those fail before, but it could be because I tugged the wires too hard and bent the circular pin.  It was an easy fix once I figured it out.

While the Van Halen pin never had any problems, players could not hear the callout to tell them how to choose David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar as the lead singer.  If I had it to do over, and wasn’t so frazzled from fixing SharpeShooter, I would have simply defaulted the game to randomly pick the lead singer.  As it was, people many times started a four player game before pounding on the buttons enough to start the actual game.  If I was standing there, I would explain how to start the game, but most of the time, I wasn’t standing beside the machine.  Van Halen actually ran all weekend and never needed to be reset.  That is a testament to that little Pi and how well it worked.

So now everything was working, and we decided to go to lunch.  (Went to BT Smokehouse which is by far the best restaurant in the area.  Much better than the Oxhead Tavern).  Got back, and found out that every once and a while SharpeShooter lost USB communication.  That was one of the changes that I made between two years ago, and this year.  I didn’t have time to fix it properly, so I threw a keyboard and mouse onto the USB bus which fixed the issue most of the time.  Now that it is home, I can fix it properly.

By the time we got back from lunch, it was almost time for the seminar.  I sat in on the last half of the seminar on making a 60 in 1.  The guy seemed really knowledgeable and seemed like he had been building them for years.  After that, I did my seminar on general pinball electronics.  I have to give a shout out to Richard K.  for giving his opinions on the best way to clean contacts and controllers in EM machines.  The talk ran a little bit long, and we didn’t get to the last few slides.  It sounded like there was a mixture of people interested in pinball electronics, and were building their own machines.  I gave away a bunch of free stuff and hopefully everyone was happy.

After the talk, I finally got a chance to go play some pinball.  We ended up playing until the close of the freeplay room.  We went into the VIP lounge but it was even louder in there.  There were so many people, and the room was so small, that we just walked right out.  We adjourned to the bar, had a couple of beers, and then closed out the night.

Next day, machines were up and running properly, so I got to spend more time playing a ton of EMs.  I love the old EMs.  They are certainly my favorites when going to a show like this.  There was a Zaccaria Time Machine that I really wanted to play, but it had a failure and wasn’t running.

At 11 am, I walked a couple people through what the inside of the machines looked like, and how the boards worked.  It ended up only being a couple of people from Manchester, NH, but I was glad to see their interest.

At about 3:00 pm, I ran out of steam, and decided to pull the machines and go home.  Through my own mistake, I had never really put the machines officially in the free play room.  The nice part was that I could pull the machines a little bit early and not be charged a fee.  I went back to BTs for a last meal and drove home.  I was absolutely spent on Saturday, and then spent most of Sunday laying on the couch.

When I get a chance, I will put the videos of the talk up on youtube.  Both John and Derek K. recorded the talk.  That’s about how it went.

7/4/2017 – Ready for Pintastic 2017

We are ready for Pintastic.  All the machines have been moved to the garage so I can put them in the car on Thursday night and drive them to Sturbridge, MA Friday morning.  I gotta tell you, I’m sick of building pinball at this point.  I need a vacation.

I just figured out last night, that not only did Joe and I retheme a whole machine including rules, electronics, and art from middle of January to now, but I also rewired SS3 from Gen1 OPP boards, to Gen2 boards, and updated the Pinball Framework to support the newer cards.  That is one heck of a lot of pinball for one year, and I am tired.

I will see whoever is going to Pintastic this weekend.  I’m giving a general seminar on pinball electronics on Friday at 3:00 pm.  There will be a good amount of free stuff given away.  Come one, come all.   I’ll be around all weekend so stop me if you are interested in seeing how the machines work.

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6/28/2017 – Another Van Halen Gameplay Video

Fixed some small stuff tonight, and shot another video.  This will probably be the last video of Van Halen before Pintastic.  Gotta jump back over, and get Sharpe Shooter 3 back up and running.  My gosh, these machines just might be done before Pintastic!