Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Bingo flashboard Neopixel retrofit

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Galane:
The local Elks lodge has an ancient Bingo King flashboard. Looks exactly like this one. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-bingo-king-machine-automatic-308807258

There are zero electronics in it, it's all "brute force" wiring where each ball hole on the board has a lever microswitch with a wire that directly connects to a lamp on the flashboard. There's 75 controlled lamps on the board and 5 that are always on for the BINGO letters up the left end. There's at least 77 wires in the fat cable connecting the console to the flashboard, assuming just one ground wire.

I'd like to replace the 28 volt BA9S bulbs with LEDs but can't find any for sane prices. The companies that make these flashboards will happily sell people white LED BA96 bulbs, for $4.50 each. $360 to replace all the bulbs is a no-go.

I've been thinking that a pair of Arduinos or the cheaper Raspberry Pi models would be ideal for this. One in the flashboard to run 80 Neopixels and one in the console to read all the switches and communicate which ones are on to the flashboard controller over a simple cable with a few wires for power and data.

The sticking point is how to read 75 or more switches that could possibly all be on simultaneously? Not that it's very likely that a game of blackout would ever go to 75 numbers, but the capability has to be there.

I say or more because other switches would be needed for some additional features. With Neopixels and Arduinos or RPi it would be possible to have color animations triggered by the operator with a button press.

For a less ambitious way of doing it, how about reducing the 28VDC going to the flashboard so that the quite inexpensive 6V BA9S white LED bulbs available for retrofitting pinball machines could be used? I figure there's a 120VAC to 28VAC transformer in the console and a bridge rectifier.

Martin Miranda:
for the switch scanning you need diodes per switch.
it's the same circuit for scanning any switch matrixes.

Martin Miranda:
you can use RS-485 for data. but for power it's better to have a separate power for the display board and switch panel.

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