Release has been pushed back from July 4 to latter part of August it seems, but what can we expect. Will updated tables for the ALP HD basically be the same as the 4K release? Or are we talking massive physics and visual upgrades?

Part 1

My original plan with the software focused primarily on the shutdown sequence. I use Home Assistant, so I planned to send a webhook to Home Assistant to trigger an automation that would wait a specified period and then cut power when the ALU was shut down from the RCADE interface. That was easy and worked, no problem. As I thought about it, though, what if a user didn't know about the shutdown and just pressed the button? Or what if I wanted to reboot instead of shutting down? What if someone who wanted to do this mod didn't have Home Assistant?

The answer was to move all the logic onto the Shelly and the ALU. Big thanks to the team who work on RCADE for all their support and for making such an awesome system that makes all this possible.

To handle the button press and shut down or reboot:

I added a Python webhooks server to the ALU that starts on boot. On the Shelly, I have 2 scripts.

One script is for sending the call to the ALU to shut down or reboot (single-press shutdown, long-press reboot).

The other script is a server to determine if the ALU has requested a shutdown from the UI. This is what was happening originally on Home Assistant.

The files needed for all this can be found on GitHub.

Edited to clean up links.

I've been using Legends Unchained for a while, but over the past year I've-

1. Discovered OpenFire Lightguns and
2. Gotten a BitLCD

That's prompted me to put a lot more love into my ALU. Before I got the BitLCD I had made a little "mini-marquee" with a Pi and a Small screen. It would load the marquee and then switch to display the control mapping for the game once the game was started. I put that project on Github. Full disclosure, while I have some software development background, this is still heavily vibe-coded as that hasn't been my job for almost 20 years. I've gone through it all as I did it, but if that bothers you, you should know.

When I got the BitLCD I wasn't happy with having to pull the USB anytime I wanted to make changes, so I modified the project to use the BitLCD for the marquee and the small LCD for the control map. That's not on Github yet since I've got to go through and do a test run for install instructions. It's a big difference in how it works. I also made custom boot screens for the two screens. I'll update this post when I get the Github uploaded.

This then lead to making a theme for Legends Unchained. I'll upload that later too.

All that is the backstory though to what this post is about. While I was doing all that work I got annoyed by two things.

1. Having to go up and down the stairs whenever I wanted to check something I changed.
2. Not having the machine power off after shutdown.

While there's a limit to what I can do to fix #1 (can't really screen or VNC into Legends Unchained), I can fix #2.

Legends Unchained allows you to run scripts for various events. That's what I use to update the marquee and control mapping screens, as well as launch the screensaver on the two screens. One of the script events is on shutdown. That means I can trigger something to actually turn the machine off when I shut down.

Knowing all that, I decided to figure out the hardware. I had asked about this in the Legends Unchained Discord a while back and then followed up with Claude. I spent a lot of time talking to Claude about this idea and how best to implement it. The hardware I ended up with was

- 22mm 12V momentary power switch
I went with a 12V so that I could just split the power off the ALU's power, and it's the same size as the original power switch.

- Splitter for the 12V (I also already had some of these on hand from another project).

- Shelly 1 Gen 4
Also powered by the same 12V and able to handle the small load that will come through what was going into the original switch.

I split the power from where it comes into the control deck. That feeds the Shelly and the new power button LED. The power button's LED are the red and black wires. The blue is the Common, and the green is NO.

From the 12V supply, the Red goes into the Shelly's 12V. The Red from the button also goes in there. This will allow them to share the power. You can also connect them in a dozen other ways, but I was trying to keep it as simple and compact as I could. I wasn't able to do that with all the ground wires.

The black from the 12V supply goes into the L on the Shelly (in a DC application, this is ground). Also needing to connect to this are the ground from the button LED, the ground from the original switch, and the Common from the new button. That all couldn't fit into the Shelly, and I had to daisy chain them together with some lever nut connectors I had on hand.

The red and yellow wires from the original ALU Switch go into the I/O on the Shelly. I used quick-connects so that I didn't need to cut the original wires.

With it all connected, I secured it upright (upside down once the panel was reinstalled) with some hot glue. Here are some photos. I'll put the software side of things in a separate post.