Saturday May 25, 2013

Techdose Blog



More Boards On The Way
I'm still having some fun with designing helpful tester circuit boards for pinball machines, mostly classic Bally/Stern stuff right now. I've also done some slight re-designs to existing boards and am very happy with the results.

Probably the board I'm really itching to get in is the redesign to the bench led display. I don't have a picture of that, but will definitely post it once the boards come in & I have one fully assembled. If everything works out with the new boards, the new design won't require a wiring harness. Instead it will plug directly into the MPU board. This saves me 30-40min of creating a custom harness per display. I'm mainly excited though because I haven't offered this one for sale yet and I'd really like to see what people think of this one once it's out there. I doubt it will sell that quickly but for the people that do buy it, they're going to enjoy how much easier it is to work on boards at the bench (or in the machine) with some of these testing tools.

One of the new designs I submitted a board order for a few days ago is a playfield switch tester board (pictured in this post). It's going to be a "budget" version for people that don't mind flipping a few DIP switches to switch between the strobe lines. I've found some people *REALLY* hate DIP switches.. and I'd agree if it wasn't for the "rocker" versions of the DIP switches which I find completely bearable. The other versions you have to use a fingernail, pen cap, etc to flip really do suck. I haven't figured out exact pricing yet but should be under $20. I'm also be creating a version with all 40 switches on it which will probably be in the $40-50 range.

Posted May 11th, 2013 4:38 PM by AceBHound
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Bally/Stern 5101 Budget RAM Adapter
Another project has made its way into an actual PCB board. Pictured is what I'm calling a "Budget 5101 RAM Adapter" for Classic Bally/Stern/Williams pinball machines. I'm selling it as a bare board, kit or fully assembled (though the fully assembled version is less "budget-friendly"). This adapter board allows you to use a 6116 or 6264 RAM on older Bally/Stern/Williams MPU boards.

This one is loosely based off of one of the first memory projects I started with pinball machines to adapt a 6116 RAM to the 5101 pin-out. It evolved quite a bit and turned into a pretty versatile board, allowing use of either a coin cell battery, memory capacitor or soldering remote battery leads to it & also jumpers to allow use of either a 6116 RAM or 6264 RAM. It could also be used along with 6116/6264 compatible NVRAM as just a straight-out 5101 adapter board.

More info on this adapter over at Pinitech.

Posted May 11th, 2013 4:23 PM by AceBHound
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Gottlieb NVRAM
Been pretty busy lately fixing up a bunch of project machines, but have had a chance to test a few more prototype boards I had made a few weeks ago. One of the neater mysteries I had finally figured out a few months ago is how to get the 5101 NVRAM adapter design I had made working with Gottlieb machines that utilize both chip enables on the 5101. I finally submitted the board design and after my prototype order went MIA with USPS for a bit, it finally showed up last week & I'm very happy to report that prototype is working great in a Gottlieb System 80 machine.

I'll soon be making orders for a bunch of memory products I've been working on over the last year and getting them up for sale on Pinitech.com. It will be good to finally wrap up some of these designs and see what kind of market there is for them.

Posted Apr 18th, 2013 7:26 PM by AceBHound
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Classic Bally / Stern Pinball - Cabinet Switch Testing Tool (connects to MPU)
I don't think I ever posted a picture of what an assembled Bally/Stern cabinet switch matrix testing board looked like. Well, here you go :)

I'm pretty happy with the functionality of it and used along with my bench test LED display it makes adding credits, starting a game & stepping through the tests/audits very easy. I assembled the two other prototype boards I had and they sold pretty quick -- so I think I'll be doing a very low volume run of these (10x boards or so) and make them available over at Pinitech.

Posted Apr 4th, 2013 6:15 PM by AceBHound
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Announcing: Bally/Stern Bench LED Display
Okay this one is long overdue, but I finally had a prototype made up of a display design I was working on for classic Bally/Stern pinball machines & decided to make it into a bench testing display. You connect it to a Bally or Stern MPU board & you can then press momentary switches to switch between the different players. Very useful at the bench since you can then verify the game is ACTUALLY BOOTING and when used with other testing equipment you can actually simulate a game and view all the player's scores. Plus you can enter switch test mode and test all the switch circuitry that way too :)
More Information on the Display

I'm glad to finally see something come of this project since it's been sitting in a mess of wires for over a year. I started out with making the display portion and then had put the rest of it on a bread board. I was really shooting for full-size displays that could be used in a machine, but there are a lot of other considerations with power, long-term use, etc.. so I just decided to go ahead and shrink the design down & make it a testing tool. I'm happy with the results and can finally clean up that mess of wires!

Posted by AceBHound
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Previous Topics

03-18-2013
Neoloch's Budget Memory Tester (5101, 6264 & soon more)

03-17-2013
Gottlieb System 1 Switch Tester

03-03-2013
Bally / Stern Cabinet Switch Tester

03-02-2013
A Buffett of Prototypes

02-18-2013
February 2013 Update

01-13-2013
January 2013 Update


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