Lighting (GI)

The first thing I did with this project was to pull off all the wiring, and lights. I unscrewed each and every light socket and pretty much cut the wires to each of the coils and switches, as i planned on wiring it all up myself later.

(playfield underside with wiring and lights removed)

I then had to work out how i was going to mount an LED in place of each globe. The solution I came up with was to solder a resistor onto the -ve leg of the LED, then solder the +ve leg into the light socket, while wrapping the -ve leg around the outside of the socket like in the image. From there mounting the LED was trivial - just screw it into the existing hole, and wire it up.

(LED + Resistor in a socket - early version - subsequent attempts got neater)

First thing to do was all of the GI (general illumination i.e. always-on lights). I chose to use 5v DC for all of the lights, as the microcontroller I bought can run off 5v, too (more on which later). As this was my first attempt at anything electronic related, it took some learning of soldering skills etc, but I got much better at it as work progressed.

(half of the GI complete)