Curses, I won't be able to enter, I don't think my gear will arrive in time! Good luck to all though.

Wait, is there any point in wishing everyone good luck in a competition? It's not as if more people are going to win! Damned logic!

Ha, thanks! I feel like I haven't done much for my entry though! Maybe I'll just explain why I'm really keen on the AS-2518 lamp board tester. I find those annoying to test properly, as it's so clumsy to work on them in the machine, and I have to cable them up to an MPU board or other driver on the bench. I figure just putting the machine into test mode and plugging in the tester would be so much quicker/easier! Even on the bench, it would still be a lot better, as otherwise I'd end up testing the outputs one by one, and there are *lots* of them on these boards.

A question - has anyone built a simple test driver for these boards, perhaps something simple that plugs into the interface connector and just strobes all the SCRs? It's so easy to do, I might actually build one myself, but if there's something around that's cheap enough, I'd be better off getting one of those instead. I do a lot of these lamp boards.

That's OK, you could use DC. All you'd need to do is have a normally-closed momentary switch to interrupt the power supply to the lamps (but not the board). If you stop strobing the SCRs and kill the power to the lamps, none should re-light when you power them up again (until you start strobing the SCRs again). Any that are stuck on are faulty. Ditto any that don't come on when strobing normally.

(Edit - using a decent 5v PSU, you could probably run both the lamps and the board off it, using the above method)

Probably an AC power supply for the lamps, and something that cycles through each lamp when in auto mode? Presumably in manual mode, you can step through the lamps and poke at the board with a meter.

Yep, definitely! I was going a bit on the low-tech side there. I don't know how long those SCRs would need in the off state to break the latch, but that would be easy enough to look up or work out.

True, though I think my preferred usage would be to be able to see all at once, rather than have to cycle through them, or wait, to identify bad ones. Having the whole lot flash on and off would be ideal! I'm just too impatient...

Oops... and the worst thing is, I don't have anything festive for my dogs to wear!

Possible, but looking at the controls on it, and the limited functionality, I'd guess just a bit of (probably 74 series) logic?

And here it is, something I threatened to do a few weeks back... turn your volume down before watching this video, btw. Oops.

More interesting than a bump... maybe?

Lamp tester in action!
lamp tester

Me doing something silly. Who can spot my mistake?
bench display

Yep! The main one I was talking about. It was a 'WTF... ohh, right, I see' moment.

And this! This is a machine that's just come in, so it was the test victim for the new boards. I hadn't done anything useful to it yet. It does amaze me that the battery hasn't leaked, given that it looks like the original 70s one. I'll take it out and frame it! Having said that, I do see quite a few like that.

Hey, the jumpers on this one are nothing! People do some weird and wacky things to when setting up the ROM jumpers on these boards. I'm working on one where quite a few of them are done in bare copper wire on the back of the board. Looks very tidy from the front, startling from the back...

Good luck everyone! But especially me!