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?

I ordered this one from amazon.co.jp
it's made for building models, but is packaged with a table mount as well as a thin metal plate that acts as a [moveable] base for the magnetic end opposite the LED lit magnified ring. the magnet holds really well
it comes with an ac adapter but can also run on 3 AAA batteries

https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B0077JAXAO

51t+8VJEz5L._SL1040_ (resized).jpg

agreed. even though I'm fortunate to live in an area where I have access to no less than 4 locations that purchase nearly every new pinball machine produced, that number is dwarfed by the number of collector's in the area that have impeccable collections as well

for example: with american pinball's houdini, I know one location purchased one, but 2 members of our private league also did the same. so even there, the home buyers are outnumbering the routed machines at a margin of 2 : 1

iron maiden was no different. 3 locations purchased pro machines, but I know of at least 6 or more individuals in my area that purchased, pro, premium or LEs

wow! that 01005 is tiny!! what's the make/model of the one with the monitor? that thing is bad ass!

$3K-$6K depending on model. ouch
definitely not geared for home use

and without any available schematics, how do you propose doing diagnosing a problem on the SPIKE board? if they are multi-layer (more than 2), you're going to be hard pressed (or at the very least, it will take more time to trace circuits to determine pathways and identify issues.

yes, working on SMDs is harder but not impossible. however, if you have a broken trace inside a sandwiched layer, good luck identifying that without a schematic and that's one of the problems that people have already identified with SPIKE

stern wants to keep all of the cards close to their chest and in doing so, they are alienating not only the operator techs, but also the people who have spend thousands for their home collections that don't want to pay $300+ every time a node board goes bad

we had an asshat that would use nonsense variable names in his code like 'bowwow', 'meow' and 'woofwoof' (needless to say he was one of those "furries" and a rather odd person at best

the node board system is horrible for lack of a better word. I recently had a friend have to place multiple orders for a total of 4 node boards to correct an issue with his star wars LE.

the lights indicated one thing about a board being good (which it wasn't), resulting in the purchase of 1 more board than he had to (but only after placing 4 separate orders each for an individual node board). the fact that each of these boards were unique to the game didn't help matters either.

plain and simple, stern really dropped the ball on rolling out the system without having a good diagnostic system in place within spike. as was pointed out, george himself stated that this is the case, yet there is still nothing on the horizon to correct this or help the operators / technicians.