WPC89 Power Board communication

[poodull]

Anyone here know how to directly control a WPC89 board? I guess a
simple example would be using a printer port, but the specific pinIO
is what I'm interested in.

fc

[kendall...@gmail.com]

I haven't gone the route of trying to control a board personally. I
so a certain extent have been using a cpu to control usb controller
boards. I believe the guy who did the AC/DC and Rush machines went
your route.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ilk9Zd5n5g

I was looking for his construction site and can't find it. It is out
there. He really just took over a space shuttle machine and put a new
brain in it. Pretty cool work. I really appreciate the work he did
on having a dot matrix.

[kendall...@gmail.com]

Found it...

http://s107351202.onlinehome.us/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?m-1146309506/s-0/


On Apr 16, 5:37 pm, "kendallvanp...@gmail.com"

> > fc- Hide quoted text -
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> - Show quoted text -

[poodull]

Yeah, I saw that before. Impressive stuff. But like FreeWPC, its the
wrong direction for me. I don't want to change the rules of a game, I
want to create a whole new system. There's major issues with the old
line of Williams and now Stern that blow my mind. Lack of servo
control, lack of RGB leds, LCD displays, etc...

All I want is a clear example of taking a WPC89 board and transformer,
plug it into a parallel port and command solenoids to fire, lamps to
glow, and listen to switches.

There's a guy who did exactly what I want but he won't help me. It's
killing me.

fc

[Brian Dominy]

On Apr 17, 12:26 am, poodull <fcu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All I want is a clear example of taking a WPC89 board and transformer,
> plug it into a parallel port and command solenoids to fire, lamps to
> glow, and listen to switches.

Do you mean the CPU board, the power driver board, or both? The
switch circuitry is on the CPU board; everything else is on the power
driver board.
On which do you intend to plug in the parallel port?

My guess is you want to dump the CPU board completely and use a PC for
that. You could rig something from a PC parallel port to the power
board OK, but then what about the switches? Also I'm not sure a
single parallel port has enough I/O lines to do everything.

- Brian

[poodull]

Yeah, dump the cpu board. control the power board directly. I only
said parallel port to keep the idea simple. I'll probably use an
arduino as an intermediary between the pc and the power board.

So the idea is this.. I need to send what? 8 bit values or just on/
off... thats the part that I don't understand since I have no EE
experience. I imagine there are less pins than actual switches,
lamps, and solenoids, regardless of the matrix setup. So it talks to
a .. logic gate? and now I'm lost.

[kendall...@gmail.com]

On my end I'm using an I/O board called a UHID. It is made by
Ultimark. It is USB.

The way mine is wired up is through a home made driver board that uses
mosfets to drive the solenoids. Here is a diagram for folks. It
became a pretty simple circut to do once I knew what I should do.

http://www.kendallvanpool.com/Caploungepinball/uhidcontrol.htm

Please ignore the rest of that site. I'm having problems with it and
much of the information is incorrect.

> > - Brian- Hide quoted text -