Quoted from PanzerFreak:I hate Sterns node board concept. What a stupid way to screw your customers to ensure they can never work on their own boards and instead force them to spend hundreds of dollars on replacements instead.
I love the *concept* of the SPIKE system and node boards. There have been some growing pains for sure but the concept is a natural progression for pinball control just like going from EM to solid state. It will in the end make pins way less labor to build, way less wiring, more reliable and easier to maintain by using a design concept that has been more than validated by the auto industry. If you look closely, the parts on the node boards like transistors that are expected to fail are not surface mount (just like SAM) and can be easily fixed by the user. Unfortunately the problems with a lot of early node boards were poor design in parts that weren't supposed to fail. These problems are becoming very few and far between at this point and the node concept will carry on for the foreseeable future if not forever. The same node concept is used in AP and the remake CGS games. I assume that Deeproot will use it as well and some day if JJP wants to stay in business, they will most likely go to a similar system and get rid of the dinosaur computer system they use.