Hello,
somebody calling me from here in order to jump from sofa to PC
Few answers, as said by Wayne, my tester doesn't force any segment or digit at any moment therefore no risk to damage either LED or Plasma display because it's compatible with all aftermarket LED displays, even the ones with low resistance.
Last weekend I decided to get rid of a pile of old zaccaria damaged displays and I used my tester to test them and detect was was wrong.
In few hours I tested more or less 30 displays and recovered/repaired something between 10 and 15 of them.
the testing goes so quick when you know what to look for that you really save a bunch of time.
On bally is even easier because you only have one IC and in most of the cases if you have no data it's the 4543 to be replaced otherwise it's the plasma display itself or some transistors when segments/digits missing.
Now coming to the main question, unfortunately I cannot tell you how reliable are those boards on Ebay/Internet because "shame on me" I never had time to test them, I even have one waiting on the desk since more than one year. Maybe I'll test it soon... but do not forget that you need quite poverfull power supply in order to step up from 20v to 200v
So you would wonder how do I test them?
I have two test benches for Zaccaria and therefore I have the Zaccaria power boards which provide me with the 170v current needed for both Zaccaria and Bally.
Now let me be honest with all of you, some of you know how much time we can spend in inventing/developing some test boards (Wayne???) and how few of them are sold around and that's one of the reasons why I never wanted to invest more in finding an external power source for HV, just because I have literally no more free time for this and the hours I would need for it wouldn't be paid off by sales.
Last thing, since Cheddar just came up with this topic and the shipping fees, I'm happy to give a 10$ discount off the shipping fees for the ones here who want to get one tester V2, but this will require some delay in shipping as I won't be able to ship them before Monday the 11th of February.
You can PM me in case of interest.
That's all for the moment, hope I could answer some of your questions.
Gianfri
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Pinball Solutions
www.pinballsolutions.eu
LED displays for Zaccaria, Bally/Stern, Williams/Data East and much more... visit our website.