No limits control panel build

Hey guys,

Am having a bit of a geeky moment in life and am setting out on 2 projects.

1. Control panel build for No Limits
2. Virtual pinball machine cabinet

This No Limits panel is sort of a warm-up of our skills ready for the pinball cabinet. You probably saw the panel that Theme Park Innovations talked about:
http://themeparkinnovations.com/products/the-ultimate-accessory-for-nolimits-coaster-simulator/

However, after sending 3 emails over the years enquiring about their panel and never getting an acknowledgement, I'm setting out to do it myself...

So... things that are fine so far - getting the panel enclosure, getting the push buttons, getting it plugged in and essentially acting as a keyboard input.

Problem 1... Trying to get the button's lights to flash correctly. I know No Limits says in its logfile which track it loads up. Is there anywhere the program outputs the status of the gates/harness/dispatch to? If it did then I could get the buttons to illuminate/flash when appropriate...

Any help would be most awesome!

yes good but EXPENSIVE!!

This sounds like a very cool project! Keep us updated, I'd love to see how this turns out! Also, when you're finished would you mind posting the source code? I'm a computer science student and I'm interested in how one would go about doing this...

^Will do!
At the moment it's very much at the planning stage and thinking through what is possible. Got suppliers sorted for most of the physics bits and as soon as we get to building any hardware stuff I'll get some pics up.

[Mikey]

The reason that you never heard back from us is because we really didn't have any further developments on the product from the time you initially inquired.

The main issue that kept us from finalizing the panel was finding a way to reliably get feedback from the simulator to the actual control panel. The input side was easy, all we did was take an old IBM keyboard apart and wire the contacts of the push buttons to the the corresponding event keys in the simulator.

So long as the light timers reset on a fixed amount that was also set inside the simulator the panel worked pretty well.

Ah ok, that makes sense Mikey. Thanks