Quoted from newbieinKC:When you say "increased load on +5 line", do you think the current required to run LEDs is way higher than what the plasma control boards consume from +5V normally? I would hate to fry my 6803 control board (which is nearly irreplaceable) to fix a problem with my power module (which has aftermarket options).
Pretty much any aftermarket LED display is running off of the +5v power supply and will add additional current to the 5v regulator. For this type of display (Bally 6-digit or 7-digit displays) it'll be somewhere between 0.8-1.5A for a set of 5x displays in most cases. The nice thing is, the displays on Bally machines are multiplexed, so theoretically this load the regulator sees is "pulsed" and not a constant load. This is also worse-case with 8's lighting on each display (ie. all segments lit up). I wrote some technical stuff a few years back when I did load testing explaining the numbers more.. took a bit of time to get a good test setup, but gave me something to shoot for in my own display designs as I wanted to "play nice" with the 5v regulator.
The Pinitech UNO / Pinitech TRADITIONAL displays I'm selling light the displays plenty bright IMO, but are more conservative in current consumption than some of the other aftermarket display sets. What I found is "low current design" gets tossed around a lot in marketing & I wanted to ensure I could back it up if I listed that as a feature myself. As such, I chose to limit their max current to something that still lit them plenty bright, while also keeping them lower current than quite a few other aftermarket display sets. At max, displays I'm selling are going to be around 100mA current per display (0.5-0.6A per set). That's less than a number of other displays on the market. I figured why not. No reason to drive the LEDs hard, since at some point driving them with more current doesn't gain you a lot in terms of brightness. Plus, I can feel comfortable advertising them as a "low current design" this way.. even if someone's using 7x displays in $6MM