These past two weeks have been very productive, and I am getting closer and closer to firing up the solenoids. There's so much to talk about.
In this post I cover my new 5v LED power supply (tweaked to 5.5v), measuring the Chameleon IO Controller's power consumption, updates to the ChameleonIOController.dll, a custom 3D printed wire connector bracket, wiring up main power and ground to the power drivers, a potential ChameLED v2 redesign, playing around with the IO controller's latency now that it's hooked up to the playfield, and beginning the Chameleon Pinball Engine's software updates.
Yeah, that's a lot to cover, so be sure to click through to read the whole post.
5.5v LED Power Supply
I picked up a new 5v 5A industrial power supply to handle the LED's. With it hooked up to my voltage meter, I trimmed the potentiometer to set the output voltage to 5.5v, splitting the difference between my ChameLED's and the CoinTaker LED's voltage designs.
Powering up the LED's with this new power supply, the difference was night and day (or more like night turned into day, that's a lot of light!). The 6.3v CoinTakers now look fantastic, nice and bright and with almost no flicker at all when PWM dimmed. And of course the ChameLED's are still bright and beautiful with absolutely no flicker! I'm not really sure why the CoinTakers has a minor bit of flicker, but I expect it is due to their fully-rectified AC/DC design, though it could be because I'm still slightly underpowering them.
I put my ammeter on the new power supply with all 76 LED's lit up, and I recorded 4.4A, so it's safely within the 5A capacity of this tiny power supply. Looks like I got a winner. This also means that, on average, I'm now pulling about 58mA per LED, though I haven't yet retested the ChameLED vs. the CoinTaker to see how each performs.
