Power cord is loose

What's the status of LED D1?

D5 LED that's off is 12V.

What is the revision of the Spike CPU board in it?

Have you tried reseating the SD card at the top of the board?

We had the same issue with our 3lviraLE last week. Turned out to be the SD card in the CPU board. Top right of the CPU board. It clicks in and out. Card was faulty and crashed. We bought a new 16GB card and flashed the software on and put it in. Game has worked ever since. All the instructions are on Stern website

Faulty SD card as per photo

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Genuinely I’m starting to wonder if Stern are using old stock Boards with Elvira this is about the 3rd report of none booting/node board failure on a newly delivered Elvira.

Didn’t get these reports with BK3 or JP2 for the cost of Elvira these things should have been checked, double checked and triple checked.

Have you called Chas?

Yep. You want it fixed?

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I would image a new SD card. This happened to my friends Elvira also. Maybe they got a bad batch of SD cards or the .83 code has issues with crashes.

https://sternpinball.com/support/sd-cards/

Chas is the only hope. Poor guy handles all the crappy quality they put out. He’s good in my books.

Chas is the best!! Don’t forget him on Christmas. Just a quick note of thanks I’m sure would be appreciated. He does a lot to help me on all my Stern machines.

I think it’s much more likely that the early .83 code is to blame. It’s not like Elvira has a special MPU board. They are the same.

Happy you got your game going.

There is some amazing help and really good genuine people on Pinside.

Ours was definitely the SD card and our game was loaded with 0.87. I have since put the faulty card into a "doctor" programme we have, and the cards memory is bad (unstable). Sometimes the card reads 14GB available, sometimes on 7GB. Both times card was formatted before I inserted.

I think this issue affects more 3lviras than people realize. I went back through the owners thread and there are a few Pinsiders having trouble uploading the new code and have to flash a new card. First time for us and the process took hours. We had to download all the software for the game and the software to flash the card. There is also software issues where the game works in test but does not work while playing the game. I feel these issues are card related also. Sometimes the CPU can read the card, sometimes it cannot.

Ug, same thing just happened with mine. Game is dead aside from some lights in the MPU and power board.

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Thanks for the info though. Will slap in a better card. Guess it’s a bad batch.

You will find all the red LEDs are on, on your node boards too and no green. Red is power, green is signal.

The issue could be code related and the code is destroying the SDHC card. I am not sure about that but our game has not stopped since we replaced the SDHC card last week.

Good Luck!

Wonder if Stern just bought a lot of counterfeits. I'd be interested to know what kingston thinks. I know Sandisk can tell by the manufacture lot numbers on the card if it's a fake. Performance on counterfeits is really poor and you see these kinds of problems on a large percentage of them over time, so I wouldn't be surprised.

You are welcome to any info you like @vireland. I have the old card.

Looking a bit deeper, I didn't know that Kingston is not a manufacturer, but "brand only" for flash memory. They buy whatever is cheap and rebrand as Kingston for retail sale. Apparently they have bought rejected memory lots in the past and sold them at retail with similar results to what's seen with Stern SD cards failing.

Seems like Stern should consider changing brands to an actual manufacturer of flash memory so there's tighter quality control on this important component.

Samsung is arguably the best right now.

Thanks for chasing that up. That explains a lot.

Pretty shitty from Stern really.. In Australia 3lviraLE cost $15,700 landed and it comes with a below standard SD card that will more than likely cause the game to crash.

I don’t think Stern knowingly purchased bad cards. Is that what you think? They bought what they thought were good ones I am sure.

With even a tiny bit of searching, it becomes very clear that Kingston flash memory is just rebranded lowest-price leftover/rejected flash memory from actual manufacturers as Kingston doesn't make flash memory themselves. As a result of that price-focused almost-anything-goes quality control, Kingston has had a fairly long record of failed flash memory quality stretches.

For a manufacturer selling $5500 and up machines, that alone should have disqualified Kingston as a supplier.

EDIT: Kingston bought Imation in 2016, I guess. Not sure if they got flash manufacture through that acquisition, but even if they did, Imation had an inarguably worse rep than Kingston so probably didn't help matters.

It's been an ongoing spotty problem since the beginning of Spike.

I think Stern knowning bought the cheapest SD card without doing any due diligence on the product. I also think many other people like me have emailed Stern letting them know about the issue and Stern have done nothing about it.

These are only (relatively small by today's standards) 16gb SD cards. The price difference between these crappy cards and even a halfway decent one is a buck or less AT RETAIL (I assume less in OEM quantities Stern is buying them). I guess it's another situation like the crappy factory leg brackets where Stern is especting the home user to upgrade it themselves to overcome investor greed-motivated cost-cutting issues.

Go with sandisk I buy thousands of official micro sd cards and very very rarely have issues with them.

Sandisk has MAJOR counterfeiting problems, so you have to be careful where you buy them. Amazon is russian roulette and ebay is roulette with 5 chambers filled. As long as you're careful and get a legit Sandisk product, their quality is good.

check the power cord

2nd post. Thanks Ben! Welcome to Pinside. This one has been solved.

Where are you finding this information? A source would be appreciated.

On Kingston's website:

"Kingston Today
Kingston has grown to be the world's largest independent manufacturer of memory products. With global headquarters in Fountain Valley, California, Kingston employs more than 3,000 people worldwide. Regarded as one of the “Best Companies to Work for in America” by Fortune magazine, Kingston’s tenets of respect, loyalty, flexibility and integrity create an exemplary corporate culture. Kingston believes that investing in employees is essential and that each individual employee is a vital part of the company’s success."

https://www.kingston.com/us/company/about-kingston

Industry trade articles, etc using google search. Kingston is a monster manufacturer in DRAM, but apparently not flash memory, so the "manufacturer" statement is true but not true for EVERYTHING they make. As of 2016 they were still a bottom feeder buying leftover and reject flash and rebranding it. In 2016 they bought imation, but from what I've seen that only affected usb products, although that could have given them flash manufacture capacity for SD. Unfortunately, it was Imation, which didn't have a good rep to begin with.

My SD card on Elvira failed a few days ago so I decided to make a video regarding how to burn a new SD card. I hope this helps anyone having this issue on Elvira or other Stern Spike games.