Stuff the average pin owner might repair. Fuse holder, transistors. Through hole is nice.

Other stuff that ends up with a board repair person with more experience and better equipment, surface mount is fine.

LTG : )

Ben,

My thinking is right in line with yours. The one exception would be switch controllers considering people seems to blow them up fairly often. If you're going with switches on a serial bus rather than a matrix, you might not have that option, though.

Basically, the stuff that gets blown up often try to go through hole. Otherwise, SMT is easier and cheaper to assemble when the boards are first built.

I agree with herg, including the switch controllers comment.

terry your supposed to be on vacation..
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Yea I am in line with this thus far.. I personally have no issues with SMD as long as its all pinned and reasonable assumption that you can do it with home own gear..

I cant stand chips with the pads under the chip.

I have no issues with for example the WOZ Driver Board.

You happened to mention how "space" was used in relation to some components.. In modern electronics, space and power draw are issues.. I think in pinball that isnt a concern ..ever. Like WOZ for example the driver board is large so even with SMD.. no fear of overheating near components replacing a resistor for example.. I assume price over anything took SMD for some components there. once the repair people give SMD a chance its really not that bad. just cant use plumbing solder and your giant solder iron from 1982 radio shack.

a game from factory with socket-ed thru hole?! whaaaa

I have no issue with smd. If prospected buyers wont learn smd then pft who cares. Get with the times is what I say. If people are going to bitch about through hole rather than learn the current method then they need to seek therapy.

Very cool, but most won't know WTF your'e talking about. We'll just play pinball and you guys figure out the rest!

The more surface mount, the better.

I love surface mount, just don't use anything like BGA or anything else that hides pins under the chips. I think that is beyond most pinball people (including myself).

Surface mount is OK at the bench, but who wants to drag a hot air station out on a service call?

Not me.

how many calls u think youre gonna get

It's pinball, it breaks all the time.

I don't want customers bringing their entire machines to my shop, nor do I want to have to make a return trip, with repaired boards in tow.

Everything should be field serviceable.

I dislike surface mount. I hate removing chips. Scarey things hide under them!

My first rev solenoid drivers/LED drivers are all through hole. I thought it would be easier to build. I have regretted that decision almost immediately. I can populate surface mount boards much faster and the quality is a lot better. (Of course, that might be due to the fact my soldering ability is only good enough for 1970's era pinball machines). For my next rev, I'm expecting to do through hole only for the high power connectors, and the high power FETs. Everything else is going to the surface mount.

The other thing to remember is that the surface mount parts are significantly cheaper in most cases. It drops a good 20-30% off the cost of parts, smaller boards which saves more money, and then takes me less time to build the boards (depending on the card, it is anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 of the time to populate the boards). If you are sending boards out for populating, it saves even more money.

Ben,

As enterprise design goes, modularize EVERYTHING. If it can be socketed for easy swap, do so. If it can be set in some type of quick disconnect, do so.