There are 5 types of boards used to control your pinball machine. The Main Board, Input Boards, Coil Drivers, Playfield LEDs, and Global Illumination LEDs. There is also an additional board that holds fuses/capacitors.

Controller Board

Backbox + Speaker LED's - Your RGB LED strip for the backbox will plug in here. If you have speaker lights, they will extend off of the backbox LED strip.

Cabinet LED's - This is where you will plug in your left and right cabinet LED strips. Other brands may call these Expression lights or other names. Cabinet lights are lights built into the left and right walls of your cabinet.

Playfield LED's - This is where you will plug in your playfield lights. Playfield lights are all connected to each other and includes both insert lights and global illumination lights.

Coil Comms - This will plug into the first coil driver board. Each coil driver board connects to each other in what is commonly called a daisy chain.

Four Direct Flipper Controls - The negative terminal of your flipper coils will plug into one of the four slots here. These are separate from the coil driver boards because they are connected to special operation pins within the microcontrollers that allow turning on and off at a higher frequency. This is useful because modern flippers are turned on and off at a high frequency to keep them in the up position. If a flipper were to be given 100% power while in the up position, the coil would overheat and burn in less than a minute of gameplay.

Two Stepper Motors - These pins route to an external stepper driver board. Stepper motors are precise control motors useful for driving linear movement. One example use of a stepper motor for pinball would be the sandworm mech in Dune. It has to lift several inches up at a slow rate.

General Output - These pins can be used for various output. No specific use, but they are provided for any unique ideas. If engineering external hardware, these pins should not be supplying more than 10-20 milliamps.

Switch Comms - This will plug into the first switch input board. Each input board connects to each other. The first connected input board will also connect back to the controller board at the Input Line connection. This is the electrical line that the system reads to determine if switches are in an on or off state.

Mod Events - This is a Data and Clock line to read information about the state of the pinball machine. As events occur, like game starting, jackpot shot, game over.

Power Connectors - The yellow square locations indicate where power will be fed in from your power supplies.