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Taking over your GoldenTee Tournament Marquee with your Arduino – Intro

A while back I encountered a GoldenTee Fore machine in one of my local hangouts.  I noticed the “Tournament” marque display (“topper”), was just scrolling technical info, device serial number, and some random bar name.  The GoldenTee folks had turned off their call center that used to control these tournament boards years ago.  So I went digging, and came across some info on what it takes to control those boards.

One of the first discussions that I found was here, and this thread contains a lot of the info that got me started.  http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=77092.0.  There are lots of discussions about reprogramming/replacing the programs on these boards.  I didn’t see that anyone had made real progress with reprogramming these boards, so I decided to take a look at something that was atleast possible given my skillset.  I would build a replacement control board for my GoldenTee Topper.

I purchased an extra tournament topper for 50 bucks on ebay, and tore it open.  It appears there are several versions of this but the one that I had happened to be a 2 piece set, of a control board, and a led display board.  The control board is a pretty intense pcb that has power drivers for the led rows, several I/O control methods including several modems, and what appears to be a data link back to the main game board.  The led driver board appears to be a large set of 5v shift registers.  Replacing just the control board is a great option, if this had been one of the 1 piece toppers (they did make some that are all integrated into 1 board).  Then replacing the whole thing would have been too expensive.

Shift Register Datasheet. http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tpic6b595.pdf Looks like a 5V reasonably high power low side led shift register.  At this point I thought we could control one of these with one of the arduinos sitting around my office, they are 5V and would require no extra shifting and protection.  Next time, Ill discuss the hardware required to power the leds, and the connections required to control the display.  Stay tuned.

 

 

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Will the real Satoshi please stand up.

Lots of speculation and claims around the real identity of the creator of bitcoin. The person or persons that originally have claimed the identity of Satoshi Nakimoto, has been silent over the last couple years. This silence has lead to rampant speculation as to the real identity of the Bitcoin creator. The latest claims may be the LAST as Craig Wright is attempting to put the speculation to rest. Craig is a long time member of the Bitcoin community and claims to be able to wield the private key power required to prove that he controls the original blocks of the Bitcoin blockchain.  There is broad coverage from Gizmodo to BBC with some harsh criticism to the “proof” offered so far.  We will see Craig if you can come through.

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It’s a great time to mine ETHEREUM

The Ethereum gold rush has been going on for the last month or two.  It isn’t too late to get your ETH miner up and running.  ETHEREUM is still running near 10 USD and a 100MH/s miner is still making you more than 300 bucks a month on about 1000 watts of power.  Do the math on that and you are making several times most area’s power costs.  The longer you wait the longer your ROI timeline.  Participate in the next cryptocurrency gold rush and get your piece of history.  Check here to check the current ETH profit calculator.