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Thankyou - Enjoy the Film

Firstly I want to state that this was in no way my idea  - I need to thank and acknowledge Hoopstar from Adelaide Australia for originally coming up with the idea - his original plans are at his CFTBL site. Without his imagination - none of us would have this mod available.

I also used a lot of the information that I found for this type of modification at the Kansas Pinball Site and I thank him for the detailed pages that he has available.

I also need to throw a big thankyou to Beaky from Aussie Pinball Forum for drawing me the electrical diagram and advising me what to buy and how to wire this up.

This is a look at the DMD panel on Creech , it is meant to represent cars at the drive in and the DMD screen is the drive in screen.

Like the Kansas site says , this DMD panel is a little dark when you are playing the game and needs brightening up. The idea was to make it appear that all the cars tail lights are on and also to light the STARLIGHT lettering in the Drive In sign as well as the yellow star in that same sign.

I would be using 9 x 5mm Blue LEDs to light up the lettering, 1 x yellow 5mm LED for the star and RED 5mm LED's for all of the tail-lights.

I was not clever enough to do the flashing / scrolling lights like Kansas did so my end result was just to be the LED lights I was adding to be lit all the time when the game was turned on.

I followed the instructions at Kansas Pinball Site for making a template of all the tail-lights and drilling out those holes , my following information takes place from that point in this process forward.

I had seen others do this mod and seemingly just drill holes that the LEDs fit into for the lettering, I assumed that would just create a 5mm 'dot' of light within each letter and that would not look good, so I wanted to router out the shape of each letter in STARLIGHT so that the blue light would fill the entire letter up.

So I had to work out a way of getting the STARLIGHT lettering shapes traced onto the rear of the panel and in the correct spot - here is what I did.

Firstly I scanned the STARLIGHT corner of the DMD panel into my PC and printed it out so I could cut the shape out that I required.

And then double check that it was the exact size I required

Now this was just printed on floppy normal A4 paper  - how do I reverse this and get this translated properly to the rear of the panel?

Step 1 - I laid some clear contact over the paper printout so it held it's shape properly.

Then I got some cardboard that was about 1mm thick and stuck it on top of it.

And then I proceeded to cut the lettering shape out of the cardboard - end result was that I got the STARLIGHT text cut to the perfect size and shape that was nice and solid and able to be laid on the back of the panel.

Next I measured where this had to sit in place and was able to stick it down in reverse , exactly where it needed to be.

Now I got a sharp blade and ran it around all the letter edges  - you will notice that I marked the space in between the lettering with dark area's so I wouldn't cut there. When I had finished cutting the edges out I was left with all the 'slice lines' and I was able to get a pencil and go over them , giving me my borders to router out the shapes from - as can be seen below.

I already had the holes drilled from earlier - it wasn't until I had drilled those holes early that I started to realise that JUST having LED's shine through those holes would look dumb and hence that got me thinking about doing this whole routering process.

I used a Dremel tool to cut the shapes out, I initially had this and then cleaned up the edges with a file.

I keep saying it - but I don't understand electronics at all, so thanks to Beaky from the Aussie Pinball Forum I was able to get this job done.

Beaky drew me up some diagrams and advised me what I had to buy and how to put it all together.

The below shot shows the RED Led's starting to be placed in their spots and soldered together - these were done in groups of 4 x RED Leds and a 180 resistor for each group.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE - I did NOT drill ALL the way through the front of the panel with a 5mm drill bit for every RED LED - what I did was to take a look at the size of each tail-light and I drilled a small hole where necessary all the way through to MATCH THE TAILLIGHT SIZE , I then drilled the 5mm hole for the LED to push into on the back of that hole, that way ONLY the required amount of red light comes through and ONLY hits the tail -light where it needs to , as opposed to creating a glow around the outside of the tail-light.

The Kansas Site explained how one or two of the tail-lights LED's sat under the speaker and explained how he went to extravagant lengths to raise his speaker - I cut up an orange Cliffy post to make little raisers.

Sorry Cliffy !

I thought I had better check the way everything was 'sitting' at this point before I went too far.

So far so good.

After checking everything was going to fit and all the RED's were in place I was able to sort out where the wiring would run.

And here is the first test run in action - amazingly something I had wired up - was working !

I made sure that the LED's were sitting back from the very front of of the holes as I didn't want the 'dot' thing happening. Once again I took the Kansas Pinball Site advice and I had flattened / shaved down the top of these LED's and the yellow star LED in order to help diffuse and disperse the light.

Here is the entire panel all wired up

Guess it's time for another test run now - holy shit this was all working !

A few shots of the end result , starting with a comparison of the STARLIGHT sign before & after. You can click on this image and get a larger version of it at my Flickr pages.

It is difficult to photograph this overall without a decent camera this shot gives you some idea of the tail-lights on but you also see the reflection from the white globes in the curly ramp in the game.

The following images will give you a better look at it - and it really does look good.

Was it worth it ?

Yes.

However - you should be aware that this took about 10+ hours from start to finish - it is a big time investment for a small modification but one that I feel adds a little bit to an already cool game.