mypinballs segment display confusion

[Aziz Pinball]

Hey Folks,

I'm trying to run my homebrew alphanumeric display with MPF. Following the writeup of Sir Scott Danesi (https://www.scottdanesi.com/?p=4220) I designed it to be compatible to the mypinballs displays. If I send commands like 1:1:HELLO?DISPLAY from a serial console to my Teensy which controls the display, it displays just fine. However MPF seems to not send correct data. I set up a test that looks like this (display.yaml):

#config_version=5

hardware:

segment_displays: mypinballs

mypinballs:

port: /dev/ttyUSB0

debug: true

segment_displays:

display1:

number: 1

segment_display_player:

# empty all displays on game start and setup displays

mode_attract_started:

display1:

text: ""

mode_door_open_started:

display1:

text: " COIN DOOR IS OPEN "

mode_door_open_stopped:

display1:

text: " COIN DOOR IS CLOSED "

When I open and close my coindoor, the display is supposed to show the status, but it does not. It blanks when mpf starts, but that's about it. When I look at the serial data that is sent when I open and close the door, it becomes obvious why:

1:1:??<\n>
1:1:<\n>
1:1:???<\n>
1:1:<\n>
1:1:???<\n>
1:1:<\n>

What's also confusing me is that nothing about the displays shows up in the logs, even with debugging enabled and logging for platforms configured to "full".

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!
-zap

[myPinballs]

Hello,

This was awhile ago, so i need to probably double check some things,  but my display hardware here was designed for use with bally/stern early 80s segment displays, which only accept numerical data. Scott took the concept further for his TNA project and used alphanumeric characters to i think, but the MPF framework here was just for using my original hardware.

Regards

Jim

myPinballs Electronics

https://mypinballs.com

[Aziz Pinball]

Hey Jim,

oooooh you're right, it works with numbers and your explanation makes a lot of sense! However I could have sworn I had that display running with characters as well at some point in 2020, because the code to control it including the text was still in my MPF configs. 
I think I even sent you a picture of the display back then, which you put on your insta. It displayed something else on the picture though. Since I don't have insta: would you mind checking when that was? Maybe I can go to my Gitlab and check the MPF code around that time.



Maybe I used a different platform in MPF? I was pretty sure I used the myPinballs compatible firmware back then though. It's all a bit confusing :)

-zap

[Aziz Pinball]

We're getting somewhere: I found the line in the mypinballs.py implementation that limits the display to numbers and commented it out:

#text = re.sub(r'[^0-9 ]', "", text)

Mind you, I'm running MPF Version v0.56.2 here. Now I can display text on my display, however it trims down every text that I sent to the last 7 characters. I can't find the place in the MPF code base where that would happen. Any ideas?

-zap

[Aziz Pinball]

Found it. Made some adjustments on segment_display.py and segment_display_text.py. I can use the full display with text now! And I feel like I need to go wash my hands. ;)


-zap

[Alex L]

Please send a pull request or (maybe easier since you're not on the latest 57 code) list out the changes if you can. Can you validate whether the change suggested last year on Github is part of your fixes?

https://github.com/missionpinball/mpf/pull/1880