No aura lighting!

They are tying it to the backpanel which does lighting effects for the lenticular backpanel, which when applied to the aura is just going to create random light noise across the playfield.

Rolling aura out without making it independent of the backpanel and coding properly to enhance game play is just a money grab and an insult to the design team of the game who never would have been done it this way.

I will never play a hot wheels with them installed.

I believe they are 12 volt, so you might consider not hooking up to backpanel, but connect 12v directly so all three colors are on which will make white, which will illuminate the playfield nicely and not interfere with light shows. Not sure if full brightness will be too bright.

The first issue is the way they are being hooked up, so that would need to change to really correct it. Once wired correctly, all of the lightshows would need to be updated to properly light it. Keep in mind the those LED strips are not individually addressable LEDS, but the entire strip is always going to be a single color at a time, so things like 360 degree wipes, which Hot Wheels does a lot of, won't look quite right, but the sides could be set to light at the most appropriate moment/color or just kept white. As I mentioned the backpanel does odd lighting when the ball is in the pops to bring the lenticular to life, so in single ball play the aura is probably not terrible, other then messing up lightshows, but in multiball . . .

The better approach for the quick hack they did, would have been to not tie it to the backpanel and to just set them to a shade of white and use it to illuminate the playfield. That would still mess up red line mania, but would have been a bit cleaner. They could have easily used a small driver board so as to have proper control and done it with nominal code work, make it white, change to red for redline mania, dim during mode and MB start/stops so the lightshows look good, etc. Actually, now that I think about it, there should be spare 12V drivers on the flasher/motor/backpanelRGB board, but that would require different connectors or inserting pins into an existing connector and of course the coding, which I'm guessing would have gotten in the way of the quick cash grab Fix was looking for. Also possible that with me gone and Shalin the EE gone, that no one really understood how the RGB system works and that there was capacity, although Mitesh did learn a lot about the RGB system when we did the board design for GTF which introduced more re-usable 'generic' boards for things like rows of arrows and inserts.

I'd have to look at the board, but if memory serves it supports the backpanel (3 drivers) up to 6 flashers, and and 5 '12v motors' (not steppers, for which AP uses a different board). Since the game has just one motor, there should be at least 4 12v drivers left that I believe could be used for RGB strips, can't say with 100% confidence since I don't remember the details of the boards design. I know my plan for GTF was to have the overhead strips be separate right and left, but for proof of concept, we tied together and we used the backpanel connection, since there is no backpanel strip on GTF, and guessing that is how it remained, but I've not really looked at what was one after I was gone.

Bottom line, it could have been done correctly, without a huge effort, had they wanted to. Maybe someday if I have some RGB steps laying around I'll test it out.