Our new PINBOARD System

Introducing the PinBoard

A control board is the heart of a pinball machine, pumping the coils while collecting all the sensor and switch information. Our PinBoard is a new, modern, and luxury control board that forms the heart of our own machines, yet it has features that make it useful for homebrew builders too. Some of the ways in which the PinBoard takes what a control board does and polishes it.

Collecting Data

The slimmest version of the PinBoard can handle up to 128 switches, which is expandable. Each is checked thousands of times a second, and the two industry-favorite options are available on every board: direct switches, and matrix switches. The PinBoard itself has buttons to allow navigating various controls and options, especially useful for the homebrewer, or for walking a customer through service calls: get to the technical data without a fuss. Would you like to know how healthy some coil is? Power usage is tracked by the PinBoard, so why not just see how much power is going through that coil?

Cannons Away!

Coils gotta coil. The PinBoard can drive your 12V or 48V noise-makers in a classic on and off fashion, and it can drive them using PWM, or Pulse Width Modulation: by turning a coil on and off several thousand times a second, you get fantastic control over your coils and their power. And if you want better accuracy with timing those coils, our PinBoard can trigger and stop coils with sub-millisecond precision. A thousand times faster than you can blink. On the technical end, we’ve made our coil drivers stronger and more efficient in how they “flip the switch”, using full MOSFET gate drivers for our 48V coil cards, which among other things helps preserve those MOSFETS, even though they’re already rated for much heavier duty. As is everything in our design.

Feedback

On the PinBoard itself is an LED for every switch (including the matrix switches!) for instant confirmation that each one is working. And every coil driver also sports its own LED to show when that coil is on. The PinBoard has a tiny DMD (dot matrix display) for basic messages and options, where it can show you charts of power usage, trigger history of a switch, and the like. At a glance you can see if a fuse is burnt, interlock status, and that the various parts of the board are all working as they should. LED feedback is provided for every major component of the PinBoard.

Safety

As mentioned before, our PinBoard tracks power usage, and it does it separately for 12V and 48V. If things are going in the wrong direction, such as a failing coil or bad wire insulation, the PinBoard can “shut it down!” and quickly at that. Our interlock also takes safety a step beyond the usual: a disconnected interlock on the PinBoard doesn’t just prevent the brains on the board from trying to fire a coil, it prevents any coil cards from carrying through with those instructions. For a machine that purposefully turns on coils that can catch fire in seconds, we can’t imagine any other way. Can you?

Add it On

The PinBoard is modular, meaning you can add on parts as needed. The difference with some designs is that our PinBoard self-contains those add on parts, as “cards”, like in a classic computer. This cuts down on wiring, space, assembly problems, wear problems, etc. Modularity shouldn’t mean more “spaghetti” in your machine, it should just mean more. All coil drivers take the form of cards, specialized for 12V or 48V. If you want something unusual, like driving a servo motor, having Wi-Fi connectivity, or reading a thousand switches, those are cards too. And our card system makes those add on’s cheaper, and very importantly, replaceable. What happens if you connect a coil driver to a dead short and refuse to stop until that driver packs it in? Well, pull out that card and slap in a new one: easy.

Unique YOM System

With our new YOM (Your own Music) System, you are now able to upload your favourite songs as the background music to our game. Once your music is uploaded via USB, you can use chose a single song or multiple songs to play in order or randomly.                            Just one of the many unique assets we have added to this pinball machine.

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Vancouver, British Columbia

CANADA

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sales@pinballadventures.com