(Topic ID: 216134)

NVRAM on System 6

By oldschoolbob

5 years ago



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#8 5 years ago
Quoted from barakandl:

A competitor straddles the ram chip over the male socket header strips which creates assembly and other issues as you either are cutting the socket headers flush to the board or forming the fm16w08 leads so it sits higher off of the PCB to clear over the socket header strip.

There's at least one active manufacturer of compact 5101 modules that I know of that does that.. and another that no longer offers nvram products that used flush-cut headers, but it's not what's being done on my 5101 modules if that's what you were referring to.

I'm not going to give away the secret sauce in my own techniques since I've done that enough already through the years as one of the first few pioneers of the nvram products for pinball (since 2013). I will say that on those particular modules the assembly and clean-up time takes longer than any of the other types I sell. I've definitely had a hard time justifying being able to sell the 5101's in a 10-pack to match others bulk pricing on nvram (which is something else that I had started years ago and others adopted). Keeping ahead of inventory on them is always challenging.

The larger board design with the nvram chip to the side didn't look that great to me. It's as compact as you can get though unless you figure out some more creative assembly techniques. I just forced myself to find a way to do a compact module that looked aesthetically nice and was still solid quality. Cutting header pins down and depending on just a tiny bit of solder in the through-holes didn't seem like a very good idea (again, not what I'm doing on mine). Plus you can't even get them flat to the board even cutting with micro-flush cutters and it all adds a ton of time.

Truth be told, I'd actually considered going back to the standard larger board design (as my prototypes were) several times just to speed things up. Never pulled the trigger on that though, which forced me to just get quicker at assembly with the current design. I like the compact design better anyway, they store easier. Assembly is the Achilles on those, definitely not very profitable considering price-point and time invested.. but kind of gets averaged out with the other modules that are less time-intensive to build.

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