Quoted from Kevlar:What would have happened if I'd turned it on and walked away? a fire?
That is for the courts to decide
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Quoted from Kevlar:What would have happened if I'd turned it on and walked away? a fire?
That is for the courts to decide
Quoted from Zitt:There's nothing wrong with 48V to a node board.
My opinion: The problem is that Stern doesn't actually have real electrical engineers on their staff who have the proper knowledge of what and how to do things. So; they do something half arse... or implement a "reference" design from without actually understanding what the circuit does.
So; you end up using a 48V to drive a linear regulator... or spec a electrolytic cap when the reference design clearly states LOW ESR caps are needed... to that engineer a cap is a cap... and any cheap cap will do. Hell; they may even "outsource" the design external to the company.
I'm saying this because I've looked at the first gen "node board" design in my STLE; and that node board design is beyond wacked. Sure it "looks right" on paper... but implementation is just wrong.
That said; I don't see any evidence of better methodology from any other manufacture... except one.
Maybe they engineered them by costing cutting of taking an good plan and then just starting takeing parts out till they stop workinged and then you put the last part back in.
Quoted from branlon8:Except one...!! Are you going to leave us hanging?
From my limited understanding of these things I see a few competing systems: Spike, P-roc, Microcontrollers (Beaglebone) and JJP
The way I figure, JJP got it right: standard PC motherboard and SSD harddrive running the game and the displays, high power operating system linux, separate driver-I/O board for the mechanical stuff, separate amplifier sound board, pretty much all the computing power in the backbox where it belongs (starting with DI) and separate cables going to the coils and switches (makes repair easier). It seems to me this is how WPC would have progressed, had Williams continued to make games.
But still an switch matrix and node board like system for the lights.
Quoted from branlon8:But I think the RGB controllers are just taking the digital signal from the computer in the backbox and routing it to the correct led-board. It’s a very simple task - not much computation required.
And you need to reboot / power off / power on when they get stuck.
Quoted from Pin_Guy:Two things come to mind:
1) Excessive use of zener diodes as regulators all over the place...WHY!
2) Metallica (not Spike) magnet boards that burn because they have a 5W resistor that helps dissipate heat from the Zener regulators...except, the magnet has a thermistor for overheat protection that opens if the magnet gets too hot, when this opens ALL the power (8-9W) goes to through this 5W resistor. I don't need to say what happens after that...
I think they out sourced parts of the spike system and games before spike did have some half spike boards in them.
Quoted from 1963BSARGS:I had a similar node board 8 issue. If you already replaced the led to no avail, that is telling you that your right slingshot gi is shorted somewhere other than in the led, On mine, stern had done a crappy job of insulating the gi wires where they go under the frame bracket for the flipper. Over time, the gi wires vibrated and wore bare on the edge of the metal flipper frame. From the factory, there is a piece of fish paper stapled between the playfield and the bracket which is supposed to insulate the gi wires. On mine, it was not stapled in the correct place and allowed the gi wires to rub the flipper bracket.
On mine, the worn insulation on the gi wire was barely perceptible. I removed my flipper and used heat shrink tubing to fix the issue. I also repositioned the fish paper where it should have been from the factory.
Whatever you do, do not power off and on to clear out the overcurrent. It will sidestep the watchdog and cause damage.
[quoted image]
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Power restart bypasses an overload? and what an overload trips something then on restart damage happens?
Where is the fuse / barker?
Quoted from ChrisHibler:I've been binging on Stern SPIKE 1/2 information trying to figure our where we are with failures and repair of the various node boards.
It has not been a pleasant journey.
Lack of a complete set of schematics for all node boards ever made.
Anyone have the SPIKE 1 Node 0 schematics for "Transformers (or Avengers) the Pin"?
They are not on Stern's site AFAIK.
Lack of good answers from Stern.
Rapid obsolescence of parts used on the node boards. Ya...I know parts obsolescence is a fact of life but damn.
i.e. A8498 buck converter on the SPIKE 1 Node 0 board.
Dubious (IMHO) explanations for the various failures.
Thanks to quite a few posters for providing bits of information, herg mbwalker barakandl megadeth2600 RobF G-P-E KenLayton (RIP) Wolfmarsh Peak-Pin ... and others.
If anyone would like to contribute to what we know about the SPIKE systems, I would encourage you to either obtain a PinWiki account or, if easier for you, mail information to me and I'll shove it into the Wiki. An account is easy to obtain...see upper right corner of the home page www.pinwiki.com .
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://www.ChrisHiblerPinball.com/Contact
https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisHiblerPinball
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info
someone needs to dump the SD cards on the pin games / spike 1 home games. Just to have the backups.
Quoted from paul_8788:I wonder if a Spike 2 CPU could run a Spike 1 game. Theoretically nothing stopping it. Might require a recompile of the Spike 1 code though. Might be a longer term solution for Stern rather than supporting/supplying Spike 1 nodes. Of course right now their approach seems to be not supporting it at all, so faint hope...
No DMD display out may an issue but spike 2 seems to have the DMD system still there so it can be done with an LCD display in some way.
But may need to VM the older CPU as direct boot of an spike 1 SD card may not work with the new hardware.
Now is the plan for spike 2.5? or 3.0 still just an better CPU more cores?
And if so then newer cpu board should run older games (may need small software updates to the base os)
Quoted from HDBrian:I have been working with Stern and have some good news! They sent me email last week stating "We currently have 520-5321-00 rev C on order with our vendor so it's on backorder for the next few weeks". I called to confirm and this is indeed the node board for the Transformer the Pin and Avengers the Pin ELG home pinball machines. These 2 games basically are pre Spike 1 and are sometimes called Spike 0 or Spike 0.5 because they are the precursor to Spike 1.
They said to I can go ahead and put an order in, so I ordered 2.
the pin games also need an backup image of there SD card to be saved some where as well.
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