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6 months old Ghostbusters Pro broke! Node board issue?

Obviously you have a cheap maintenance GF, you could get one of those but not all :D:confused::mad:
It's a strange one because they can go shopping with £50 and come back with all these bags full of stuff. As soon as you take them out shopping the same amount of bags cost you hundreds:hmm:
 
Do you still have the old board? Be nice to know what actually went wrong with it, could it be repaired by experienced engineer? ( like greg said, at a fraction of the cost of a new one).
 
@huggers I have heard stories about node boards failing in the latest sterns

Could you take a photo of it, stick it on the forum ?

I would be interested to see what the hell a node board is, and it may help trigger the techie guys on here to make repros, or figure out how to fix them etc

It goes without saying that there should be no such thing as catastrophic board failure in such a new machine. I got rid of my wpt as it became obvious to me that stern sam games were designed for expensive board replacement rather than cheap board repair.

I have had my addams family for nearly 20 years and it has never even needed a board repair. Prior to my ownership it was in an amusement arcade at a caravan park
 
As I understand it Stern don't release the schematics so repair is difficult. This is the board in question, I sent the old board back i.imgur.com_OUNaHXv.jpg ;
 
There are 2 identical to that. I think there's 9 in total although I could be wrong
 
There are 3 node boards like that
That control the playfield also one node board in the cab
I did check some stuff on your old node board yesterday when I was at Phil's but nothing obvious all the transistors where fine node boards all fail in this way with the dreaded node board update failure
 
That's interesting Chris that you couldn't find an obvious fault. Guess I'll never know. Just hope another doesn't give up the ghost (no pun intended)
 
I guess it's sold as cheaper if you 'trade in' your old part against a new one.

Like the way you could get a cheaper clutch or turbo if you give back your old one that then can be repaired/refurbed ready for the next customer.
 
By the way, look at that soldering. Barely any solder on the pads at all, plus its lead free, which cracks under vibration, almost like these $50 boards were designed to fail, so they can trade yours in for another £258
STERN NODE.JPG
 
By the way, look at that soldering. Barely any solder on the pads at all, plus its lead free, which cracks under vibration, almost like these $50 boards were designed to fail, so they can trade yours in for another £258
View attachment 49286
Lead free blows. *uck the planet when it comes to repairing my pinball machines. I tried lead free solder once, promptly dropped it in the bin and reached for my trusty tin, lead, silver reel.
 
The whole stern board replacement stinks 1st they are cheap and poorly made fail on a regular basis and then limit the supply and keep prices high the price of the node boards has rocketed up also we are punished with the frequency differences electrocoin offer an advanced replacement but it's still not cheep and that's if they have them in stock
It needs someone to study the boards and work out what is failing on them my guess is it's the same component every time as it's always the same fault but as stern won't release the schematics and a lot of the chips don't have pn on then it's not that easy
 
The whole stern board replacement stinks 1st they are cheap and poorly made fail on a regular basis and then limit the supply and keep prices high the price of the node boards has rocketed up also we are punished with the frequency differences electrocoin offer an advanced replacement but it's still not cheep and that's if they have them in stock
It needs someone to study the boards and work out what is failing on them my guess is it's the same component every time as it's always the same fault but as stern won't release the schematics and a lot of the chips don't have pn on then it's not that easy

There is a microcontroller on the node board, the board is effectively a blank canvass. When the game powers up, the microcontroller has a bootloader, and it sits and waits. The CPU (master node) in the backbox then sends the game specific node board code to each node board over the serial data lines and then the game is ready to go.

When you get the node board not initialised message, it means it was unable to download code onto the node board for whatever reason. For this to be the case, you would assume that either the microcontroler has failed or there is a power issue. It's unlikely that holding a flipper would kill the microcontroller as they are not directly connected, so its more likely that there is an SMT fuse or something on the board, and Stern just charged this guy £258 to change a SMT fuse

Given a Spike machine, a logic analyser and a lot of time and patience, you could probably reverse engineer the bootloader code for the microcontroller, this is the only thing stopping you from reproducing the board, and this is why Stern will make you send the board back, they can't have people playing around with the boards and fixing them or reproducing them, as that would put an end to them charging £258 to change a fuse.

I don't think I say it enough, but seriously, f*** Stern
 
Yeah i think next time this crops up a quick whiz around the board with a meter checking all those surface mount fuses, be nice if you could replace them with resetable ones.
 
You are correct luke the first thing I checked on that board was the transistors and these where all fine so next in line would be a fuse I assume any failure of a component on that board will flag up the same message I have replaced transistors on the node board though and fixed faults it must be fused some how as if you have a locked on coil then if you don't cut the power some how then you are really going to fry something one theory I have is that as soon as the node board has a problem it then goes to the cpu to try find a fix and when it can't then flags up node board failure can't update
 
Even if you did, you'd still need the bootloader code for the microcontroller, which Stern will program in themselves.
 
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