Thank you!

Be aware many Stern node boards are not backwards compatible and game specific.

Design changes have already occurred.
Stern has no incentive to provide aftermarket boards cheaper based on present market superiority.
The term remains "planned obsolescence".
No one can fully analyze either generation of Spike PCBs because there are no schematics available!

Look to the past for comparison such as the Whitestar period after they upgraded the Sega boards from the 90s using a similar design concept.
Looking further back Bally tried a similar consolidated board concept mindset with 6803 systems which failed with operators and were short lived, but components were not SMT. For decades there was little to no proper technical troubleshooting due to some lack of proprietary design review understanding.

All pitfalls on use of advancements of technology with reduced regard for RSD considerations.

When are people going to learn to vote with their wallet? $1000.00 for a CPU board is total B.S. and I will not buy a Spike system now that I know that. I never inquired about the cost of a new CPU. Holly F**k! What B.S. All the cheapening up so they can (edit) you on boards! I'll stick to SAM.

For home use I wouldn't be worried at all. Route use maybe... you can't really get away from SMT (every company uses it now) unless you go back in time ... it is what it is.
I've only had issues with spike 1 nodes. replaced 4 node boards and a cpu board so far... but they were all on spike 1.
the games on spike 2 are still new, so we'll see. Had a place in my city that had some issues with their star wars, stern swapped it out though.

Your choices are
a) deal with it
b) stick with old games.

I bought spare boards for my GOT, shit cost me like an extra 1500 bucks. I couldn't imagine what a set of spare boards for star wars would cost.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens in 10-15 years to all the games spare parts dry up.

I really enjoy Iron Maiden and considered buying but the thought of dealing with all these costly boards just pushed me to buy TWD Pro instead

I would really love someone to bring this up to gary & george at the stern seminar at this year's expo and see how they justify an increase in replacement cost when their manufacturing costs have significantly dropped (after all, that was the whole point of developing spike I and II, correct?

it needs to be phrased correctly for maximum effect. lead them with you love how stern has finally embraced new technology which is supposed to be more robust, interchangeable and cost efficient and after getting them to agree and gush about how this is not only great for the operators, but home use customers as well due to less failure, then ask them why if it's more cost effective and cheaper to manufacture does it cost us so much f*cking money to replace what is basically a $10-50 board

also, you can then ask why, if the purpose of spike was to have all these common, interchangeable node boards, why is it that they've gone and revised the node boards for each machine (on top of having all of these distinct boards per game) negating the whole point of them being interchangeable?

We need to keep this thread going from now till expo to keep the issue fresh. Stern counts on us having short memories. I was avoiding the newer Stern games but Maiden was too good for me to pass up so I broke down and bought another NIB Stern. This board issue terrifies me and hurts the secondary market badly. It’s an RFM type of problem that is much more expensive to fix based on their current problems than RFM is...

well, I for one am going to hold strong and not buy a new Stern game until Pinside tells me it’s ok.

LOL, while I’m sure that was meant to be a joke, there are a lot of people with immense technical knowledge on Pinside and many of them are telling us we are buying giant paperweights due to reasonably foreseeable board issues.

Stern always tells us at seminars the new board set is “more reliable”, this has so far not proven true. I took the IMDN plunge and am rolling the dice, Stern needs to make replacement boards more affordable long term though.

SAM is robust, fully documented and an easily repairable system.

Spike/2 fails quickly & often, is very difficult or impossible to repair, completely undocumented, and likely much cheaper to make.

The obscene cost of replacements is only partly price gouging, in my view.

The main thing is built in obsolescence. The boards are going to fail after a while, given how both delicate and unreliable they are. What better way to encourage people to buy new machines than your 'old' ones be discouragingly expensive to repair, with little guarantee of reliability?

It's very common with consumer products, most notably Apple.

Stern now describe themselves as a "global lifestyles brand". Which should tell you something about their aspirations. They also told us that Spike was more serviceable and reliable - which I have difficulty believing that they didn't know otherwise about from the beginning.

One reason I bought NIB as more chance that your distributor will help sort out replacements.

Buying HUO Spike may seem like a saving but that saving goes out of the window if a board goes.

I route games for fun.

I am part of a group that has purchased and routed every spike PRO model to come out.
In short, every single one of them has had issues with the node boards/new technology.

In all cases Stern support has provided parts to fix the issues, but the bigger problem is the amount of time it takes on my end to diagnose and fix a brand new 5k machine. Combine that with players quickly learning to steer away from certain games due to issues and worry of failure while playing and it hurts the coin drop for the long haul (i.e. we have finally fixed our GOTG after 3 node board exchanges, but players still are going to expect intermittent weak flippers and other issues with out game forever)

Simply put, the spike and spike2 system is nowhere near as robust as the previous ones, parts fail often, and they are costly (or impossible) to get replacements as soon as the game is out of warranty or they run out of back stock for a game (since they revise them almost every title it seems)

Take warning as a home owner, because after a certain amount of time and number of plays you should expect to see more failures as these games age.

I will note again that Stern support has always gotten us squared away, but to me that still does not make up for the fact that the whole system has foundational issues (a flaky light bulb or poor code update can cause a node board to blow and coils to go weak)

And for this reason on new Games "I am out " < Shark Tank Reference

the thing is it's not just stern using this technology, every manufacture is.
The only way to change it would be to stop buying, you and me both know that's not happening .

The tech is here to stay, but...
If stern, JJP & CGC took notes from multimorphic, and now spooky. To start using something universal and something that will allow you to change out the individual light boards a lot easier.
beyond that I'm going to have to learn how to use a rework station.

Its a neat idea for non-tech home use users, but sucks for location. Probably the worst thing right now as mentioned above, is the down time while waiting on boards.

Probably a pinball 2000 situation. Someone makes a functional replacement.

That's A LOT of different replacement boards. you've seen all the different iterations of spike right?

I made an excel file with all the spike games to date minus iron maiden, just so I could figure out compatibility and what not.
here is the excel file if your interested. It might not all be 100%, I did the best with the information I could gather.
if anyone knows something I'm missing let me know.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nzQKy0jv695Ifs9u1ulfwxQMnDluOQrj

Everything in red is proprietary for that game. everything not in red is used in a different game.

They are, but looking backwards, I'm sure some dedicated pinhead could eventually have a board that's programmable to behave like any of the iterations, seamlessly, and probably with better power tolerances, since Gomez admitted that Spike sucks for power budget.

Tssk.

I would think the issue here is a premature failure, which can happen to any system (and apparently covered under warranty in your case, correct?) vs. a long term problem. Don't have the answer regarding that issue, and time will tell. Possible ESD, poor solder joints, etc. - happens to the best and most robust designs out there despite what the engineering standards call out.

Other have mentioned SMD: I've designed using SMD for decades with extremely rough vibration requirements. The low mass of the SMD parts really helps, but I use good parts, not cheap Chinese stuff. Sometimes SMD is easy to replace (i.e. a resistor), others...nope (i.e. a BGA). Of course, a node board could experience vibration issues if mounted under the playfield vs. in the backboard. Are the Stern nodes boards isolated from the PF with bushings or hard mounted?

You can design anything to last decades...or maybe not that long, depending on what the accounts allow (apologies to the Pinsiders who are money crunchers). Luckily, I don't have that issue.

Hope the new board fixes the problem!

The node boards mounted to the underside of the playfield are mounted on hard plastic bushings. Vibration was my concern and apparently Stern's as well as they started zip tying components together to better withstand the vibration. I rubber mounted the playfield boards,

Hmmm... Might be time for a trip to Home Depot and get a rubber bushing assortment. Despite surface mount technology's benefits - the less vibe, the better on solder joints.

They even did that (bushings) with thru hole parts!

I would hope Stern (others, for that matter too) - did some sort of vibe testing on assembled boards. Not hard to perform. They could have easily made a DIY vibration platform real cheaply.

Yes. I used rubber isolators. Not too difficult.

Good choice! More often than not, the best repair is made before it breaks (sort of like a new roof before it leaks)!

Electronic parts obsolescence is a real issue. Not just Stern, but any manufacture. I deal with it often. But not often what people think is the issue.

But everybody's fancy new TV, deluxe fridge, super efficient furnace, even the Chevy or Beemer sitting in the garage or driveway can have this issue. Many manufacturers of parts guarantee a production life. Users (i.e Stern) of the part might do a 'lifetime buy' if a part is no longer going to be produced to ensure they have stock for ages if needed. But I HIGHLY highly doubt if Stern uses any custom electrical parts (apologies if anyone knows differently). Just wouldn't make sense if you are trying to keep costs down, given the low production numbers. Custom electrical parts are expense! They may buy chips that they load code into that become custom tho. You could maybe by the part for decades, but if you can't get the code to program it - then that is an issue. Also, for a company, it's alway better to buy parts that multiple sources available, plus it helps drive the price down because it 'kills two birds with one stone' (cost, availability).

Don't want to scare you off from buying a newer pin - but electronic parts availability wouldn't be my first concern. People tend to come up with alternative boards when OEM parts can't be found - a void usually is filled. I'm ignoring costs tho (on purpose, that's another issue).

If anything, I'd worry more about plastics and parts that has art associated w/it. That is custom!

Just my 2 cents!

Just had my first node board failure last night on Batman 66 Premium. Lower GI went out by the flippers and slings. Sent information to Chas and hope he gets back to me today.
I own WWE, GOT, Aerosmith, Star Wars, GB, Iron Maiden and previously Kiss. This is the first time I have had a failure. Feel pretty helpless that there are no schematics to even try to diagnosis what is going on.

I’m not buying SPIKE games. That is the vote I’m making with my wallet.

I love Stern games, and I own more than a few. But I just can’t drop bring myself to invest in Spike systems. SAM games were the pinnacle of Stern games. A nice solid board set that worked great. I do understand SAM was more expensive all around (hardware and programming). So I get why they switched over. But it feels like they did this to save money while increasing consumer cost.

I’ll continue to support Stern, and I’m sure there will be more Vault games I’ll buy. But it won’t be Spike.

it is a bad situation for sure!

sad part is you cant even swap between the game you own to diagnose (maybe SW and BM? could)

I heard back from Chas. He said it only takes one shorted bulb and they will all go out. Wants me to remove the bulbs and test so I will start there.

Yeah it sucks that the boards aren’t interchangeable between games. That is definitely not a good thing in my eyes.

Well Chas was right! I started with the lamps under the slings. Put them back in and now everything is working. At least for now.

honestly, even that request to systematically remove bulbs is too much to ask for a brand new game just a few months old. Imagine them asking that is a regular joe and not a collector like yourself.

I have a huge issue with the design of the Spike system. The fact that a single flakey bulb, intermittent socket, or anything really in the light chain has the ability to screw so much up (pull power form flippers, blown node boards, etc...) shows how poorly this has been engineered.

That's exactly what happened to my GOT, NODE 8 kept resetting (sometimes once a day or once a week). I had no idea what the hell was going on for like a month and a half, I tried all sorts of stuff. replaced node 8, repined a couple of connections, redid the cat cable etc.. turned out that one of the LED's was periodically shorting out on the casing, causing the intermittent issue. I was dead set on looking for a loose connection, just had no idea it would come in the form of a broken LED.

got the hint from Noahs_Arcade when he said that using incandescents would cause node board resets. I wasn't using incandescent bulbs, but it made sense that it might be LED related.

Just had a node board go out on a Star Wars. Diode broke (likely due to vibration) and looks like it fried a chip or 2. Stern says cough up $350. Ouch for a 10 month old game.

There should be a programming solution to that. Spike could turn off the affected circuit and put a tech alert on the display.

This is the problem.

Well let's not get too crazy with our standards here. These are still pinball machines and asking him to remove bulbs to diagnose something sounds like a very reasonable thing to me. And it led to an understanding of the issue.

I do agree with your rant about the design issues, but diagnosing a flaky machine is reasonable.

You have never owned a WOZ.

Truth.

I'm getting ready to do a 2.0 lighting conversion just to be done with the non-stop lighting issues of the original 5v and 7.5v boards in all flavors.

Love WOZ, but it was by far the most finicky game I've ever dealt with thus far. I literally replaced over 30 light boards on my RR before I finally pulled it from location. waiting on the 2.0 kit that I purchased, probably going to be a little while though.

I like WOZ too. I didn’t want to replace light boards all the time. Owned 2. My first one was a standard and had multiple lamp issues. All got replaced but it was too often for my liking. My second was a RR and only had to replace one.
Heard the 2.0 takes a good 8 hours to replace the parts and wiring. If I still had mine I would definitely go 2.0

we have one on route

Luckily we waited for the 2.0 model...

When are you getting a Pirates?

oct 2017, lol

Whats the cost to covert from a 7.5V system to the 2.0 system? Wondering if its worth it on my WOZ?

$800 bucks promotional cost right now, they are planning to increase cost to $1100 though. Not sure when.
plus from what I've heard it's a good 8-12 hour job.

Thanks for the information....I suspect u might be able to recoup some cost by selling the old lights boards so its not horribly expensive...the 8-12 scares me more

$800 right now, but going up before long, since that's a promotional price. They're backordered quite a ways on kits, though. I've been waiting about 2 months and mine hasn't shipped yet.

Being able to kiss lighting problems with WoZ goodbye once and for all will be sweet, even though the price of freedom isn't.

Ive posted on this before. As a tech I am refraining working on any Spike 1.or 2 systems for the time being. This includes issues such as a simple thing as a sticky flipper. I tried helping a friend update his software on a pinball and it caused a node board to fail . It was very aggravating to say the least. In the world of home pinball repair things can fail sometimes if you look at them the wrong way Its part of the business. With WPC, Whitestar, and all the other makers its easy for a tech to have redundancy and confidence to repair a new issue.
I just had a Space Station that I did a motor replacement on the station. A few days later the the game is completely dead. He is calling me as I was the last to work on the game. Anyone who works on pinballs knows this is not uncommon. In short it was a bad cmos ram on the cpu board., I replaced and he has been happy ever since. I didn't charge him for the labor. This happens quite often as its impossible to predict what will fail next on a pinball. The good news with older games they are generally inexpensive to repair at a pcb component level. The boards are through hole and easy to repair. Replacements are pretty reasonable if needed.
I cringe at the thought in the future of working on a GB with a bad flipper and getting a call a few days later that the game is dead. I know its nothing I did but the customer does not and assumes otherwise. How do I explain to the customer that he know needs to spend $800+ on a cpu board a week after I worked on it?
Currently its not worth the stress and aggravation for me to work on the newer spike systems.I want to maintain a good reputation with my customers. If in the future schematics are provided and the boards are sold or exchanged for a reasonable cost I may reconsider. But for now no thanks.

This may have been covered in the thread but in case it has not, spoke 2 has a ton of improvements for tech. Stern will be announcing some of the new features soon enough but things like self diagnostic programming for coils being shorted and node boards being protected from shorts or surges is a huge improvement over any exsisting system. Just seeing what is on the horizon has been a huge boost of confidence in the direction stern is taking their hardware. Some of you can see this in action on some of your existing games like Star Wars or Iron Maiden.

Any system that is so fragile that adding a single mod can blow it up (as Gomez has stated Spike is) is a bad system. On paper it may have great features, but real world? So far very unimpressive and WAY too fragile.

You mean like fuses? Oh, wait ...

I doubt some software protection that they've either been sitting on for ages, or only just started writing will be as effective as fuses. Also, what have they been doing since Spike became available nearly 3 and a half years ago?