The Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show 2022 has occupied most of my time. Machine preparation and transport to a pickup spot prior to the show. Thursday was setup. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were show days. Sunday was also tear down. A day to recover. A board picked up at the show for repair. Back to building the June work quota. Interrupted by more board repair related activities.

I have a revision for this. I have built one but I want to be sure about this by actually installing it in a machine.

I have been using one of these red benders. I have used it so much that there are indentations in it from the resistor and capacitor bodies. I will try to remember to post an image of it. It is still going strong!

I have these available at this time. Please use PM.

The talk at the Northwest Pinball Collective was recorded. I don't know what happened to it but given that a lot of the more involved collectors were busy with the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show I am not surprised that nothing has been done or published. I did not talk at the show this year.

I have both versions of the 10-opto board. The original horizontal mount and the revised vertical mount.

The work queue is long. I went over on the June work quota. I only did this because for some strange reason the June work quota is nothing but WPC-89 boards. 7x PWR, 2x CPU and 1x FLP. Building the same boards in a batch is much more efficient. Working (slowly) through these now. There always seem to be local interruptions (typically repair requests). I try to slip smaller boards in the available time between build phases of the bigger boards. A session for a phase may be three hours and if I don't have the three (contiguous) hours I fill the time doing something else. I don't like doing partial phases because I don't like leaving the water soluble flux on the board for any period of time. If you want one of these smaller boards just let me know. I am sure there will be gaps available.

If only I had a fun project. I have some outstanding boards that I need to build and verify. The speaker pop eliminator is the highest priority (mentioned above). The next priority is the unified System 3-7 CPU board. At the same time I will also take care of the 6-digit and 7-digit numeric bench display. Also in this batch is the Speech Interface Verification board that ChrisHibler has been very patiently been waiting for. It probably works (simple board) so I should probably just send it. I don't have any time for these at the moment. There is also a possibility that September will be completely unavailable. Seems like the System 3-7 stuff may not be built or tested for a while.

I do want to get to this board. I'd like to be able to offer an alternative to any person who potentially needs this board. I also have a friend who loves the integrated Leon for basic board fundamentals verification. I just have to dig myself out of the lengthy build queue. The good news (I guess it's good) is that the local onsite repair technician who normally drops off boards for repair will be out for the month of July so I should be able to crank faster on the build queue. I also have an outstanding (not yet started) task to contact a potential local assembly company contact that I was given. That's also in my "to do" list.

Likewise. Come back next year! I am sure I will be asked to help out again.

I have not had the same experience. For all the boards I have built I installed the AD1851 in a socket and it works fine.

But ... I am glad you got everything working. It can be frustrating working through issues but once you've resolved them it's often a great feeling of accomplishment. For some people though it's enough to put them off doing anything similar in the future. I hope that is not the case with you.

Back to other things ...

Been busy trying to finish up some repairs I got in. They're all done and ready to go. Also working through putting together a kit for an LED DMD display for a very good local friend. I test ALL LED blocks before I install them onto a board. I have yet to find a bad block. Until now. Nothing hurts more than installing a brand new part (supposedly factory verified) that doesn't work and then having to de-solder it.

Working:

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Not working:

01_led_matrix_block_bad.jpg

And here are the promised images of the well used lead bender. It's pretty obvious which lengths I use the most! It's still going strong.

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There are a few things I would like to report but I have been kept busy with board building and unexpected local repairs. I will try to get some images of a new toy my (local) friend gave me. Working to finish up some select kits for the same friend to deliver at his July 4th party tomorrow and ran across this. First time for a problem on these 8x8 blocks although I don't use these blocks very much.

led_block_8x8.jpg

In real life, the left failure is subtle whereas the right failure is obvious. Sometimes the camera doesn't capture things the same as your eye sees.

Update.

Been busy building boards and building boards. June was WPC-89 month. July is System 11 month. It's weird how boards seem to come in batches. August is another System 11 month with some System 9.

Here is the new toy that my friend got me. It's an interesting machine. If a search is made for "lead bending tool" you get the plastic "triangle". If a search is made for "lead bending machine" you get these blue things. They are somewhat pricey and there's only a small number of merchants that actually have the machine in the US. They are HEAVY. Solidly built. All the other merchants are in China where the machines come from. Shipping is almost as expensive as the machine itself (due to the weight).

This is the machine.

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It requires cut/tape (or reels). I loaded up a small amount. The amount is 69x 103K. This is the amount required for the System 9 CPU board.

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Turn the crank a bit and this is what comes out at the output end.

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This is what the belly of the machine looks like.

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Turn the crank some more. Keep it going.

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The output end of the machine.

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The whole cut/tape has been processed.

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This is what you get in the output tray.

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One batch complete. Another two to go. Load them up and turn the crank.

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15 seconds later you get this.

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So I got 3x batches of 103K capacitors for 3x System 9 CPU boards. All I need to do is put them in the board. The machine doesn't make soldering any faster though. A wave soldering machine will do that but we've discussed that before.

I found that the best way for me to deal with this is NOT to do a whole bunch of cut/tape of the same value at the same time. If I did 500 of these capacitors then I would still need to count out 69 individual capacitors from the 500 and that takes time. So I've settled on cutting the required amount and keeping that as a template. Then the next time I need that amount for a board I just get the template and match it up to the reel and cut it off. Load up the machine and turn the crank. Exact number. No counting. No messing around. The reel keeps things organized until I need the required amount. For components that need only a small number (like less than 5) I crank a bunch of them and just count out the small number required from the output. I'll probably adjust things if need be to try to be more efficient.

What took maybe hours or preparation (in front of the TV) now takes less than an hour to get everything ready. The machine is not easy to adjust and I've got this one correctly adjusted for 12.70mm. I decided to buy another two machines. One for 10.16mm and one for 15.24mm. Those are the other common pad spacing sizes used on the boards I make. Anything bigger (such as 20.32mm or 25.40mm) I will do by hand. Those sizes are not used often and if they are used the numbers are small (except the 6A4 on the power driver boards). I am still waiting for these other machines to arrive (they were shipped by sea but still cost a small fortune to ship).

Also ... I revised this board and slipped building it in between some of the bigger boards. There is a small demand (pressure) for this so I wanted to make sure it at least works for 7-digit. I am unable to test 6-digit so I will be sending this out to another Pinside member for testing. If it works with 6-digit then there's a board heading to ChrisHibler when I get a chance.

boards_243.jpg

Note the System 11 Sound board underneath the foam. I got that verified working the other week. I took the board to a friend's place. He has an oscilloscope and that proved the digital and line level analog output was good. I suspected it was the amplifier but this was the proof. I had this board fabricated on 2020-01-12 so I have been sitting on it for 2-1/2 years. Having shown it was the amplifier I replaced the amplifiers and tried it again. I originally put eBay purchased TDA2002s as there was no reliable source at that time. These amplifiers caused one of the resistors to heat up really quickly (I used my thermal imaging device to see the heat). I replaced the TDA2002s with TDA2003s and it works. Now I need to give it a real machine test. I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Finally ... I have a fabrication order that should (hopefully) arrive by the end of the week with a new reproduction request for someone local. It also contains a special surprise that I will build when I get some time to build and post it here when complete.

Appreciate all the feedback and suggestions. I don't think of everything and more minds = better solutions.

The closest to a scale that I have are the bathroom kind that you stand on. I'm an old fart ... and a DumbAss. Separating the bunch into individuals is a task in and of itself but the previous big task was removing the cut/tape and manually bending each lead (both sides). Separating is much faster. Weighing would probably help but I think using the template works quite well. I just counted out some cut/tape for System 11 CPU boards and it was fairly quick to just match up the lengths on the reel.

I had originally set the excess lead short and found that it was really hard to pick up the bent component to place in the board. So I increased the length of the excess lead. This results in the bend not being 90 degrees (often less - obtuse angle). I end up having to bend them a little bit by hand when placing in the board but it's MUCH easier to pick them up. The other disadvantage is that the components tend to stick together as the bent leads get tangled.

The big box merchants use electronic counters for large quantities from reels. They also use weight for bulk components. I bought a bunch of bulk components but I've stopped using them in favor of the cut/tape reel. I only use the bulk for small quantities now.

Those two boards are relay boards. Their circuit and usage are documented in the manual but the manual does not document the schematic nor the pin numbers and connections. These boards are fairly easy to reproduce. I just need a sample of both to get dimensions and mounting hole sizes. I can use the traces to construct a schematic for layout. If you can source loaners for the boards I can reproduce them. It might be possible for me to source them locally but I don't know any local owners of DE JP.

I just did this with a Diner lamp board for a local friend who was missing the lamp board behind the backboard (for E-A-T). Luckily the same board is used underneath the playfield so he sent me his playfield board and will get back the original and the reproduction.

I don't know anyone locally with this machine. It might be possible to find someone locally (to Puget Sound) if you post a request to either the general Data East club thread or the DE JP club thread. Or there might be someone (else) who is willing to loan their boards.

The boards won't take long to process. I would say allow up to one week but it will likely be only a day or two. The problem I have is to find the time to finish the task as quickly as possible (without task switching). If I am able to hold onto the board until I get the fabricated reproductions back I can visually inspect the original and the reproduction side-by-side for verification. I could also do this from images so there's no absolute need to hold the board longer than the minimum required to reproduce it.

I just spread them out on a table top. It's not a big deal but when they clump together it can cause minor issues when counting.