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Flashers

Related Config File Sections:

MPF includes support for flashers, which are essentially just really bright lights that are controlled via high-power driver transistors instead of low-power lighting circuitry.

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MPF's flasher devices are only used in older machines (WPC, Stern SAM, System 11) since modern LED-based machines typically use regular LED devices (or combinations of them) as flashers. (So basically a "flasher" in MPF is any single-color light that's connected to a driver output rather than a light output.

Hardware

89 and #906 bulbs are commonly used as flashers in pinball machines.

Those are rated at 13V but typically driven at higher voltages for only a very short amount of time. Turning them on permanently will burn quickly in most machines.

Video about wiring of lights:

Config

Starting with MPF 0.50 flashers and lights have been unified. Depending on your platform flashers might be lights: or coils:. In most cases they are configured as coil:

coils:
  flasher_coil_4:
    number: 4
    allow_enable: true

Then add them as light:

#! coils:
#!   flasher_coil_4:
#!     number: 4
#!     allow_enable: true
lights:
  flasher_4:
    number: flasher_coil_4
    platform: drivers

Now you can use them in flasher_player: (or also in light_player: if you want to enable the flasher permanently).

flasher_player:
  flash:
    flasher_01: 100ms

Monitorable Properties

For dynamic values and conditional events, the prefix for lights is device.lights.(name).

color

The color of this string. If you set it to brightness values all color channels will have the same value. Brightness 100 (of 255) will be hex 64 and color 646464.

See the documentation of your platform on how to configure GIs.

Platform related How To

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