Cobra18t on pinside has produced an “all in one” board for controlling pinball machines. OPP was originally envisioned as a distributed pinball controller to reduce wiring and such. Of course, many people have playfields out there that they don’t want to rewire. (When the Dolly Parton machine was converted to Van Halen, all of the controller cards were placed in the backbox so no wiring changes were needed on the playfield).
Many people have asked for a single card solution to control the whole pinball machine that would live in the backbox. Many people have also asked for a solution where they don’t need to solder their own cards. OPP was always meant to be the rock bottom cost-wise solution and people would need to add a little sweat to make it work.
Cobra18t has decided to take a different tact and produce an “all in one” card (the Cobrapin) that sits in the backbox. It has many surface mount components that make it more manufacturable. The project combines what is needed to drive a pinball machine into a single card and it is pre-assembled. It is essentially two STM32 processor cards with six solenoid wings, an 8×8 switch matrix, and two Neopixel wings. (Strangely, it is only now, after writing that sentence, that I remembered he asked me to support a Neopixel solenoid which converts one of the direct inputs into a Neopixel driver. That makes a lot of sense looking at his board). It also adds the bulk capacitors for the power supply filter board (and even a fuse!).
Cobra18t has already spent a lot of time testing the board and has done a really good job of making sure that the parts are robust enough to drive a pinball machine. (I believe he is on his third revision) If you search around, there is a video on his youtube site where he is driving all the solenoids very quickly and he measures the temperature rise to make sure it can handle the thermal load. Great stuff. He and Jan were also instrumental in testing the OPP Neopixel support, including the aggregation of fade commands. At this point, I feel the OPP Neopixel support is better than any other MPF supported Neopixel driver. Without their help and testing, the OPP firmware would not be as robust.
At this point, cobra18t is going to make his goal. (He is currently at $5800 with a goal of $1000). If you are looking for an inexpensive controller that doesn’t involve soldering a whole bunch of wing boards and programming the firmware, this might be a good option for you. Here is the Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862357036/cobrapin-pinball-controller
Open Pinball Project 