Many months have passed, but I found some time to work on the Arduino project again. The objective of the next step is to do a proof of concept on the HUD (head-up display) of the slotmachine. While I have no idea if HUD is the “official” way to refer to the top half of the slotmachine, where the feature-game is played, it seems like a sensible name.
Anyways; the (dutch) website gokkastenarchief.nl is by far the best reference I could find. The image below shows the ‘HUD’ and what’s on there.
The feature-game is triggered by points that are provided by the 4th reel and played with cards that are displayed on this 4th reel too. For now, let’s forget about that and just proof the concept of driving all this lights (and some simple sound effects) from the Arduino.
A simple sketch (created with the great online platform circuits.io by AutoDesk) of the setup used:
The interesting part is the thing on the bottom-right, called a NeoPixel strip by AdaFruit. I got a leftover piece with 46 NeoPixels that I used to simulate the 3 main parts of the HUD.
When we count all that up; there are 44 LED’s to drive in this proof-of-concept for the HUD. The strip was kept intact and was laid alongside a printout with the symbol.
I thought it was nice to have some simple sound effects to go along with the moving lights, but did not want to use mp3 or such files. Luckily, after some googling I came across this nice library of sound effects that sends simple straightforward signals to a piezo. Little memory footprint and exactly the sort of sound effects I was looking for.