• 3D Mesh Market
  • Print
  • Discover
    •  Login Signup

    Arcade1up Pinball 85mm LED Speaker Ring Mount

    Overview

    This mount is made to insert into the speaker hole of Arcade1up pinball machines and fit an 85mm outer diameter addressable LED ring. Addressable LEDs are controlled by Visual Pinball via DOF, so they respond to things happening in the pinball games rather than just reacting to sounds.

    These rings come without wires and must have wires soldered to their pads, require larger speaker grills, and a small hole drilled close to the gap in the mount to pass the wires through without being visible outside the speaker grill. I used an 11/64 drill bit for this hole.

    I also printed my mounts using Atomic Filament Clear / Natural PLA Filament and mounted the LED rings facing inwards to make a diffused light that glows through the mounts rather than seeing the bright LEDs directly.

    Printing and Placement

    These should be printed on their backs and require supports. Some of these LED rings have small nubs sticking out on the inside at the top and bottom, some also have them on the left and right, some don't have them at all. I made gaps in the mounts to fit the top and bottom ones to help align it better. If your ring also has the side ones you can snip them off. When placing these make sure they are in the exact same orientation on both sides, not mirrored, if you want your lighting to be consistent left to right. Some effects only light up some of the LEDs, which start from where the wiring is. I found with my LED rings facing inwards that pointing the gap in the mount between 7 and 8 on a clock worked well, as many games light up the bottom 8 LEDs when inserting coins and things.

    Wiring

    As far as wiring, I wired them individually to a Cleveland Software Design addressable LED controller board. If you use this and the extension wires CSD sells, connect the red wire to 5V pad, the white wire to GND, and the black wire to DI. I then covered the connections with a thin piece of electrical tape to make sure it didn't come into contact with the metal speaker grill. I drilled a 11/64" hole through into the backbox from the front near the gap in the mount for the wires, which I popped the clips out of the male end of the plug and passed them through individually, then put them back in the plug. Be careful not to be too close and hit the edge of the speaker behind it, and not so far out that it isn't hidden by the speaker grill.

    Passing the wiring down from the backbox into the cabinet is a pain, as far as I know you have to unbolt the backbox itself by removing 4 black 5mm hex bolts, then lift/turn it and remove 4 philips head bolts connecting the piece under it to the side of the cabinet and slide that piece over slightly towards where the wiring is passed up in order to have enough of a gap to feed things through. I fed 2 of the CSD extension wires through and then closed it back up, so that I had plugs both inside the cabinet and in the backbox to connect to.

    Configuration

    I followed the documentation on CSD's website as far as configuring DOF to use the addressable LEDs, then added the device and ports to the DOF config tool website. I also added some LED strips under the cabinet adhered around the edges by passing the wiring through the gaps at the corners of the cabinet near the legs, and have those connected to the same CSD controller board.

    Parts used

    The LED rings are part number WCMCU-2812B-24, they can be found on a few sites, just make sure they're the right size and the solder pads are shown to be 4 solder pads in one small location next to each other, not multiple spread out along the ring. I've found them on a couple of sites depending where you're located:

    For speaker grills I used ACROPIX Universal 4" Car Speaker Grills from Amazon. One thing to note is that if you align the screw holes to be a cross pattern, the outer screw will not be able to be screwed in as it hits a metal threaded piece inside the panel. If you turn them to be in an X pattern, one will also hit a different metal piece. I ended up aligning them as a cross and just didn't screw in the outside screw on each grill.

    From Cleveland Software Design I used the 10 output LED controller board (but could have used the smaller one, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do), 2 of the Addressable LED Board Connection Wires to connect to the board, and as many of the Addressable LED Connection Wires as you need to reach from where you put the controller board up into your backbox, including 2 extra which you will cut the female end off of and solder to your LED rings. I also used a 3rd of these wires to connect to 2 addressable LED strips chained together around the underneath of my cabinet if you'd like to do that.

    The translucent Clear / Natural PLA filament I used from Atomic Filament: