Thanks Eric! Just got these added to the gallery, that'll get you 4x entries in the January contest

My phone takes really bad pictures too. I've tried a number of cameras and settings, but the only way I've found of getting fairly accurate saturated pictures of these displays is with a DSLR with a ton of playing around with shutter/aperture/iso. Part of the problem is the multiplexing of the displays I think. The camera is taking a picture of what it sees which is different than what the human eye sees. Adjusting the shutter speed down helps get closer to what the human eye sees, but then it's difficult capturing all the numbers lit up since the camera is faster than the multiplexing. Sweet spot would be just fast enough to capture a more saturated image, but slower than the multiplexing of 54 times per second per display. If I ever figure out a combination that works for DSLRs pretty well I'll post something here.. up until now it's just been a ton of noodling around for a few of the pictures on the product page.

For sure many of the WHITE + filter pictures are actually more saturated in-person than what they look like on the gallery The native BLUE LED digits I think are fairly accurate.. mainly because those are a bit brighter than WHITE + filter, so the multiplexing doesn't cause them to look as faded.

Those are still around? Geez, that's a really good price on 7-digit displays. Would have never expected them to have stuck around this long.

Just a reminder, last week or so for new entries in the RETROFIT Gallery Contest for January where you can win a free nvram if you've built out any sets of these displays.

List of entrants for each month is over @ http://www.pinitech.com/retrofit/gallery/ -- just 4x entries for January so far from a single person and that's it. So looks like odds will stay good on these contests for a bit. I'll continue to run a contest each month through April and take it from there!

I've decided to price AMBER SETS a bit lower starting now through end of February to stir up some interest.

$79.95ea for 6-digit sets (converts 5x 6-digit displays)
$89.95ea for 7-digit sets (converts 4x 7-digit displays, 1x 6-digit display)

If you've got some old non-working display boards kicking around, a bit of time and effort & you can upgrade an entire set of original non-working plasma displays to LED for not much more than what a few of the cheaper displays cost.

Available @ http://www.pinitech.com/products/ballystern_conversion_led_display.php

Yep, I offer a neutral filter as an option for the WHITE sets, mainly for when using them as WHITE, but those could be used to dim any color.

Last day for the January RETROFIT GALLERY contest tomorrow.

Only a few entries again this month so good odds again

And January's RETROFIT GALLERY CONTEST winner is...

januarywinner (resized).jpg

Congrats! Let me know what type of nvram you'd like via PM!

Kind of funny, I went to pick the name myself this afternoon and picked "Cheddar", but then figured since my wife has picked all the winners for contests I better let her pick. She also picked "Cheddar"

A few more kits have gone out this month. Hopefully get to see some more in-machine pictures for the gallery soon!

I still have yet to get around to getting pictures of the parallel resistor way of modifying the displays. I'm hoping to get to that in a week or two now that I can access the shuffle alley the displays are in pretty easily after some machines have left the basement Sorry it's taken so long -- been a crazy couple of months!

Presented as an alternate method of converting the displays. Same set of resistors from the kit can be used to either fully replace those components if you have great desoldering equipment -- or you can solder them in-parallel on the back of the board. The advantage is that on some single-sided boards where pads can lift easily, the original resistors left on the board act as a heat-sink when soldering (so the heat is distributed elsewhere than just the pad) and the pads are more likely to survive. Different method of getting the resistor values where they need to be, same result.. and probably quicker or more approachable for some people.

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
Kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

I don't know if I'd go as far to call them all "clean" hehe These are the original set of displays I did for the shuffle alley I have, some were done a bit quick-and-dirty just to prove the concept. If you take some care, you can get components lined up nicely and decent solder joints.

Early Stern DA-100 and Bally AS-2518-15 boards often had the 2.2k digit-driver pull-up resistors soldered in-parallel on the back of the board. Either as a factory modification or recommended modification that made it into later revisions of the boards. That was part of the reason I figured it's no big-deal to solder resistors in-parallel. I saw no downsides, you gain higher wattage rating (not really needed, but it's a gain) and once installed in a game the displays look every bit as good.

I had actually thought this would be the go-to way of getting the resistor values changed, much more approachable for someone with limited desoldering/soldering tools and saves quite a bit of time. With the resistors on the tape, if you cut the leads on one side short you just hold the tape in your hand, solder at the top solder point on each resistor being replaced, pull down on the tape to release the resistor, then move onto the next resistor of that value. Then just align the longer lead vertically with the solder pad beneath it, press down on the lead to get it flush with the bottom solder joint.... solder and snip them all. It goes pretty fast IMO. Of course, it does help to have a picture of an already-modified display to model off of otherwise it's a chore to find the pad locations and flip the board back and forth.

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
Kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

Right, it happens. Some of the old boards put up with a lot of abuse & some of them the solder pads practically fall off if you just look at them wrong. It's easy to understand why on those problematic boards, the pads don't suffer the same fate with the parallel resistor method since the factory resistor takes the heat instead of it all going to a single pad on a single-sided board. I'm a fan of the method myself. Most of what I've converted for displays has been with that method and I'd recommend it on the single-sided boards (traces only on one side), especially for anyone having problems with pads lifting on those boards. To each their own though

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
Kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

Looks nice! Are those staying WHITE then? White looks decent on its own in a lot of machines.

Oh purple will be awesome, definitely get some pictures! Lacking a ton of color options in the RETROFIT GALLERY. Thanks for submitting some photos and helping to fill it up

Still only 1x entry in the March contest to win a free nvram module. Just need to post a photo of your complete set of displays lit up (attract mode is fine) with backglass installed. Can be a zoomed in picture of the backglass if you don't want anything else in your collection/room showing. You can move displays around to different games and gain more entries into the contest.

WINNER SELECTED 1ST WEEK IN APRIL!

At this point I'm not sure if I should continue the contest after March? I planned to keep it going at least the first quarter of the year... maybe through the first half of the year, but expected to be seeing more photos posted. Seems more were posted when there wasn't a contest going on Not sure how that adds up lol.

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
NVRAM, kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

Sneak peek of some development of a full display kit. Had the prototype boards in since last October, went to build them & realized a few DIP18 footprints were done as DIP20. Oops. That held things up a bit as the project was shelved for other priorities and I had to come back to it in February to see what traces I could cut and how to rewire with minimal modifications. Really didn't feel like doing another run of prototype boards just to fix that!

proto (resized).jpg

I left multiple ways to do the source driver section, to play around on this prototype -- an IC, or transistors/mosfets with resistors. So either an IC footprint wouldn't get populated or a bunch of transistor/resistor footprints wouldn't get populated depending how it's built-out. I'm half-tempted to leave it flexible, at least for the first revision, if everything fits. It's going to depend how the new source driver IC I'm attempting to use works out. I doubt there will be too much interest in building with a few handfuls of discrete components if there's a way to take care of it with less components. I'll be playing around with some dimming circuits, though that may not make the first revision of boards -- or be left as a small add-on board.

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
NVRAM, kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

Combined the parallel resistor pictures into a PDF:
http://www.pinitech.com/docs/ballystern_retrofit_parallel.pdf

I'd like to do the same type of thing for the depopulation pictures, so any help there with pictures of depopulated boards is welcome. Basically need a clear top-down picture without any flash in it per each model display. I'll then write in component values and have something similar to what VID posted here for each model display: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/interest-check-diy-bally-led-displays-using-old-boards/page/9#post-3352176 & get them all in a PDF like above.

I doubt I'll get to it myself until later this year, but I do think having an organized PDF with depopulation pictures per model with the component values written in would make it super-easy to identify location of components that are getting changed out.

Worst case I'll just black-and-white fully populated displays and write the component value on top

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
NVRAM, kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines

For right now I combined the depopulated board images from this thread into a document. Did some lens correction in Photoshop for half of them so they were less distorted. Looks like I'm just missing AS2518-58 and the other version of the DA100 board (that *does not* have the 6 wire jumpers above the 4543).

Depopulation Photo PDF:
http://www.pinitech.com/docs/ballystern_retrofit_depopulation.pdf

I have additional boards of all of these models, so I'll depopulate a 7-digit AS2518-58 and the missing version of the DA100 and get those added to the doc. At some point later this year will try and standardize the pictures a bit more and possibly add component values in there as well.

---
http://www.pinitech.com - "Pinball Inspired Technology"
NVRAM, kits, upgrades and test equipment for pinball machines