Today we (Dorian and myself) sat down with two laptops and a 42" screen so we could both see what the other person was doing and did some coding.
We created attract mode code that can be used with the lcd screens and / or addressable leds. This code will probably be adapted for use in the Thomas The Tank Engine pinball too. We managed to get the the code to check the start button every 12 microseconds so there will be no need to hold the button in like you need to on the Thomas pinball.
The animation data still needs to be put in an array but we can use this data to slow down or speed up the animation, select a screen and select an image to display on that screen. There's also a image value to clear a screen to black.
While we were on a roll we decided to look at the LCD controller code. We needed to be able to select which screen an image is to be drawn on by turning a chip select pin to a low state. We got this to work by 7:30pm tonight at which time I had to take Dorian home. There are still a couple of tiny issues that need to be corrected which we'll get to during the week.
The next step will be to hook the screen controller up to the main controller and enter some data for a trial run of the attract mode.
As mentioned previously we also numbered the displays for both of us to reference in our code.
When we get the attract mode working, the port read code functioning and the nixie code for the War Of The Worlds pinball working we're going to continue work on rebuilding the CNC router so we can cut a test playfield.