If you've ever watched an old car's indicators pulse gently on and off, then watched a modern LED-equipped car flick its indicators or brake lights with the same abruptness, you'll have felt the difference even if you never thought about why. The old filament bulbs faded in and out smoothly; LEDs just switch, hard and fast, and it looks harsher for it. On a car, it barely registers. On a pinball machine, sitting right in front of you with dozens of lights doing exactly that, it can be genuinely distracting.
That's because the electronics in these machines were designed around filament lamps. The original lamp-driver circuits were never meant to switch LEDs — they naturally faded filament lamps in and out. Swap those lamps for LEDs, whether that's individual playfield inserts or the general illumination (GI) strings, and the LEDs don't know anything about that original gentle-fade behaviour. They just do what LEDs do: switch on, switch off, abruptly.
For inserts, that shows up as a slightly harsh, flickery feel. For GI, it's often worse. GI circuits use an AC power supply to drive strings of filament lamps. LED replacements often flash rapidly at lower brightness levels — like a strobe light on the playfield. It's one of the more distracting side effects of an LED conversion.
What Aurora does
Aurora sits between your pinball machine's original electronics and the LEDs themselves, on both playfield inserts and GI circuits. Using PWM, it fades LEDs on and off the way the original filament lamps would have — so you keep all the extra colour and vibrancy LEDs bring, without the harsh, flickery switching that gives the game away as retrofitted.
The board is built as two halves working together: one handles the inserts, the other handles GI.
The GI half turned out to be the more interesting engineering problem. GI runs from AC power. To control brightness properly with PWM, that needs converting to a clean, stable DC voltage first. The obvious approach is a standard bridge rectifier — simple, cheap, and the textbook answer. Thermal calculations, though, showed a standard bridge rectifier would generate more heat than is sensible inside a backbox that's already cramped and poorly ventilated. So, Aurora uses an 'ideal diode' rectifier circuit, which runs significantly cooler. This feeds into an onboard switch-mode power supply that generates the stable DC voltage needed to drive multiple GI strings properly.
Where it's at right now
Aurora is currently a working prototype — it's on the bench, wired up, and working exactly as intended.
It's already in the hands of some customers for real-world field testing on their own machines, which is always the real test beyond anything we can throw at it on the bench.
There's no release date to announce yet — this is just a 'here's what we're working on' for anyone following along.
If there's something specific that you'd like to see Aurora do, or you've got questions about how it works, get in touch via the contact page — feedback at this stage is genuinely useful. And while you're here, take a look at what's already available in the shop.