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.

Input Boards

Each input board supports 8 switches. The boards connect to each other in series. You can connect 8 physical switches or 8 optos (infrared receivers). Since optos are less common, the board has 4 pins to connect 4 opto transmitters. Most back loops, scoops or other parts and toys will use an opto to detect if a ball has passed through. It's a simple infrared laser beam that when blocked, will signal the ball has hit that switch.

CPU Input Line - Two wires come from the previous board and two wires will go to the next. This is the actual data bus line that determines if a switch is on or not.

8 Switches or Optos - This 2x4 block of pins will connect to your switches. There are two configurations for how to connect your pins. If you are connecting a physical switch, you will use configuration (A). If you are connecting an opto receiver, you will use configuration (B).

Input Board Comms - This is the data bus line that tells each individual board how to detect switches.

4 Opto Transmitters - This is where you can power 4 opto transmitters. If the distance between your opto transmitter and receiver are too far apart (farther than 2 or 3 inches), you may need 2 transmitters to have enough power through the airwaves to reach the receiver.

This photo demonstrates how a physical switch (left) should plug in vs an opto receiver(right).

Coil Driver Boards

Each coil driver board supports 8 coils. The boards all connect to each other in series.

-48 Volts - This is the negative 48 Volt bus. This connects all coils to the high voltage ground.

8 Coil Connections - This 2x4 block of pins will connect to your coils. One coil per pin.

Coil Driver Comms - This is the data bus to notify the board which coils should be turned on or off.

+12, -12 Volts - One 12 Volt input in and one to go out to the next driver board. This powers the mosfets.

LED Boards

There are two types of LED boards. The playfield version on the left is used to light inserts. The Global Illumination Bulb on the right is the type of light you will see mounted below the flipper inlanes, under slingshots, or any other area of your playfield that needs some extra lighting. Both LED boards have 3 pins, 2 power pins and 1 data pin.