Brads Electronic Projects Forum

I ordered new LEDs and today I will be upgrading the table with new holes and changing the wires and adding a part of the LEDs. I keep you guys updated!

brad wrote:The 18f4550 might have pll which means you wont need an external oscillator. Let me read Into it...

I did look into that Brad and as far as I can work out, PLL is not available for the internal oscillator block.

Yes the 18F4550 has PLL with an External oscillator as I use it alot with USB to run the oscillator at 48mhz.

So here is an UPDATE:

- disassembled the whole thing
- added extra slots in the wood, so next time when I need to disassemble I do not need to solder a bunch of wires
- removed all the wires from the cathodes and anodes of the screen
- drilled the extra holes
- painted the new holes
- made the opening of the table bigger (5mm on every side)
- sanded the whole thing again
- painted the top again
- added LEDs and soldered a big part of them
- added extra wires for the extra rows and columns




Tomorrow I'll finish the soldering job on the remaining LEDs and paint the bottom of the table. I'm going to mount a piece of tinted acrylic (looking for black or white) between the screen piece and table top piece. This should result in a more readable screen and no reflection on the glass.

And then the wait for the other LEDs start

WOW!.. you have been busy on that table, pretty impressive!!

Jup it helps when you´re doing it for the second time. The woodwork goes really fast now. I´ve prepared everything now. I´m only shopping for a tinted acrylic right now and waiting for the LEDs, this wil take a couple of weeks. I didn´t want to spent 1 buck for 1 LED, so the cheaper option was online. So now I can look for a good piece of acrylic that works perfect with LEDs.

When the new LEDs arrive I want to put everything back together and let the code run with the flickering. And then we can look at making the code run faster!!!

Thanks for that bitfogav - although now it makes my job harder oh well!

Great work on the table as well! Really impressed with the quality of craftsmanship there

I will eventually get around to testing out the code with a faster clock speed - the annoying part is that it messes up all the delays so everything will run fast until I fix the delays.

I've just been busy preparing my latest kickstarter project which I hope to have uploaded within a week - then I'll have a bit more spare time

No worries, the LEDs will take longer than a week, hahaha. I wonder what your new Kickstarter project is though

I should have the Kickstarter campaign up and running sometime tomorrow

During the wait I thought about designing a logo for the table, but still keeping the retroball name. This is the result (plus a cool pacman and pong reference):



And an example of how it will look like on the table:

Very Retro!

Still waiting on the LEDs, bummer...

Taking a long time? all of your great pictures have gone

Oh, I think reorganizing the photo album was not that smart I'll fix that.

I tried to paint the logo on the table in two different ways (spray and brush) but apparently the finish of the wood doesn't bind the paint properly. So after two times resanding and repainthing the surface I'm going to make a sticker instead So looking for a good sticker to put on there.




I also bought a piece of tinted acrylic (really cheap because some guy had a brand new piece lying around ) so that's the next step, cutting the acrylic in the right size. The light looks really rad with the acrylic!

The LED's look great through tinted acrylic. I used some really dark stuff for the retroball system, but any sort of tinted or diffused acrylic looks great.

Be sure to let me know when your circuit is done / close to done. i will look into fixing the oscillator for you