Berea, OH
Quoted from PinMonk: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.
All electronic systems have been and are becoming networked distribution systems. From the studio radio systems we build to automobiles and everything in between. Just like pinballs, our company has never intended to have mods applied - whether older pre-network designs or current tech. Not really "fragile", just never designed for additional circuits. There's a big difference between adding something like an automotive relay to a 20 or 30 year old electronic product, and tapping something into a high speed computerized network - sure the risk of damage is higher. We've had folks take apart our embedded board sandwhich, not realizing how careful you have to be to replace the several thermal transfer pads on the backs of some intense ICs...or the overheats and fails. That's the modern world of computerized electronics getting faster, shrinking and compacting every day.
Modern electronics is less and less a playground for amateurs as well. Back up a couple decades, if you had some basic electronics knowledge - you know some things about ohms law, and transistors, things like that...and then you got the schematic for whatever it is: pinball, stereo system, television...then you could tinker. People still blew things up occasionally. Now you get a schematic and the device has an FPGA, software heavily wrapped into hardware, high speed networking and more. You don't know what the program behind the FPGA is, or perhaps what the pinouts are expected to do - and everything is way more complicated. You can't slap alligator clips anywhere...if there is something even big enough to clip to.
A lot of folks dropped out of repairing autos as another example: You used to be able to pick up a timing light or change spark plugs and do most of your own repairs. Then computers stepped in and you had to have a diagnostic code reader. "Why is the damn program running the mixture rich?" Then it gets more involved, maybe you replaced the ECM and pretty soon the backyard tinkering was not worth it anymore.
So yeah, nothing was intended to mod - unless a manufacture puts a cable on it and it says "plug in mod here". The fact that adding a mod can damage it is not what defines Spike as a bad system.
