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Stern node fault

The problem is that if you are a business you can’t do it for nothing it takes lots of time to learn the board time to repair and investment in tools and components so you would probably need to charge a fixed repair cost of about £100 so really not worth it when you can buy a new board same day and you are up and running Much better for operating too anybody can swap the board on the day the fault is reported and you are up and running again
 
I am having a look at Kevlars for him, just waiting for parts to arrive.

could have got the part quickly from mouser but they wanted £12 delivery for a £3 part. So instead, waiting for one from china. seems to be on a camel somewhere in kazakhstan at the moment [emoji23]


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I agree that one maybe repairable pretty easy as you can see damage but most failed node boards don’t have any visible damage
It’s ok tinkering for fun but if you replace the damage components and it’s still don’t work then your a load of time in money down and still no nearer
 
@CHRIS B PINBALLS should get in touch with a local TV repairman, they do airflow repairs all day long and surely be something reasonable per board.
 
James said:
@CHRIS B PINBALLS should get in touch with a local TV repairman, they do airflow repairs all day long and surely be something reasonable per board.
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From doing my original electronics training in TV repair - not many actually exist that go to component level apart from changing capacitors. Most (if you can find them) swap boards. Also - how would a local TV repair man actually test them? If say the voltage regulator fails it can take out other things.

To make it 'viable' to do as a business, I would charge over £100 to repair a node board. I need to pay rent, and I did not wake up this morning with electronic knowledge.

Courier cost on top.

Then the customer having a moan on the phone or email as I haven't repaired it the next day and one of his 5 machines is out of order......

Also add on the fact that not all node boards fail for that reason. Others have data issues which are harder to diagnose without an oscilloscope.

@CHRIS B PINBALLS is 100% correct on this in my opinion.

In 2020 onwards, if you own a few Stern machines - I would consider buying a couple of spare nodes.
 
I always have 2 node boards in stock
No good business out of pinball would touch a node board not knowing what it’s even for and having nothing to test it in
I do agree with Alan though that if you have the time and you are willing to have a go the the sense of achievement when it’s fixed is mega
 
Roll up roll up how about I sell any non working node boards I have for say £20 all the electronics know all’s on here can fix them sell out at £100 exchange let’s say that’s half price on new or electrocoin any takers ?
 
CHRIS B PINBALLS said:
Roll up roll up how about I sell any non working node boards I have for say £20 all the electronics know all’s on here can fix them sell out at £100 exchange let’s say that’s half price on new or electrocoin any takers ?
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if anyone had the knowhow, I’d say that would be amazing, as @AlanJ said though, maybe more a passion project over a business endeavour.
 
Ok node boards, sigh...

Heres my 2p from someone who makes and repairs arcade and pinball electronics all day every day

The problem with these from a business point of view is not the fact they cant be repaired as the schematics are now available (this was the original stumbling block), its the fact that as a business you have to give a warranty on the repair and the tech just isnt reliable yet.

Yes i could buy all the bust ones , fix them and sell for £100 plus vat, but i wouldn't be giving a warranty so its a non starter. They could develop a fault the next day somewhere else and i dont fancy explaining why your £12K le game has gone down again... Plus many of the faults burn the boards up so you cant repair them back to original condition either.
 
@myPinballs when you get a failure what is the most likely cause? A component in the circuit if you will, or the failed component? I’m guessing if a board has gone bad it’s more susceptible to further failures in that circuit?
 
CHRIS B PINBALLS said:
Roll up roll up how about I sell any non working node boards I have for say £20 all the electronics know all’s on here can fix them sell out at £100 exchange let’s say that’s half price on new or electrocoin any takers ?
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Im a chancer... always up for a node8 and node9 for a GB - just for a backup (the way these things are going!!)
 
Also looking at Steve's first picture you can see that U9 appears intact, so more than likely that it's another problem...
 
Something else to bear in mind with these node boards for anyone wanting to 'repair' one. the boards are multi layer at least 4 i think with internal ground planes/data layers. These types of boards are just not meant to be repaired. Plain and simple. We are all thinking about pinball boards like the 80s and 90s, but these things are just not like that they are 'throw away nasty tech' (tm @myPinballs!! 'TANT') Kind of similar to whats in lots of technology now. Sonos devices use 4 layer boards and these are only just repairable on the power side.

Often you get a direct short on the board across one of the power planes. Removing the regulator makes zero difference as when the board died it burned up the board and shorted the thin layers internally. Now somebody tell me how that is repairable?????? Not an accident that they are made this way, designed in a throw away world for land fill. terrible... But we all buy the stuff so thats the trade off.

And something else, 3 or 4 specific issues and questions submitted to stern regarding a noted issue, what causes the issue and what to do to fix it. And the reply, -----> RADIO SILENCE
 
node 8 new one fitted and node 9 failed an hour later. Someone competent will be fitting second replacement that came today. £400 + VAT to repair a previously HUO game is not the luck we need at the moment. The two duff boards will go the Alan to mess with. As for SW - fingers crossed it will be OK as folks want to play .. until we get shut down on Monday.
 
it will be interesting to try figure out what’s going wrong with these buggers. some sort of poor design somewhere


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not had a single node board failure, CPU failure that I think was just the display. Stern have fixed some of the issues from the height of the problem which if you remember they issued their service bulletin on. Star Wars seems to have been the game that had the duff boards.
 
The previous owner followed the stern updates. Not had an issue with any of the other Sterns , spike or Sam although things have fallen off batman 66 at shows after heavy play!
 
steve brum said:
node 8 new one fitted and node 9 failed an hour later. Someone competent will be fitting second replacement that came today. £400 + VAT to repair a previously HUO game is not the luck we need at the moment. The two duff boards will go the Alan to mess with. As for SW - fingers crossed it will be OK as folks want to play .. until we get shut down on Monday.
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Ouch! Holy rheostat Batman
 
AlanJ said:
it will be interesting to try figure out what’s going wrong with these buggers. some sort of poor design somewhere


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It’s not just the hardware design that can be at fault as there’s embedded firmware on each node board that’s been updated many times over the recent years and also the way the game code uses coils etc changes so there’s many factors that can cause a failure.

I’m also convinced the firmware has suicide tech built in to when something goes wrong as a way to protect further issues meaning many different faults will result in a generic node board failure notice. It’s not like the old days when a coil driver happily burns up forever..
 
yeah i saw that. pity they’re not open source. imagine the fun you’d have with that [emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]


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AlanJ said:
yeah i saw that. pity they’re not open source. imagine the fun you’d have with that [emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]


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Also in ‘suicide board world’ if you manage to fix a burned up regulator or driver transistor or bus fault will the board come back to life instantly , or will it still be locked out and some kind of ‘clear faults’ command need to be issued or worse still like on arcade pcbs have killed the board forever by deleting some lookup tables/config values on purpose etc?? The firmware is a real black box just like on arcade pcbs and when I was looking at these a few years back there seemed to me more at play than just plain hardware

also some of the regulators are rated at 3A but I fail to see how such a small smd part with no heatsink and a tiny plane on the PCB layout can distribute that amount of current reliably.
 
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Stern sells Node Board 8 for $99 according to their site. My board dies and is confrimed dead as I swapped with board 9. Stern says out of stock. Any idea where I can get one and not get price gouged? It is pretty sad that a game that is 2 years old the manufacturer is leaving me out to dry as they are not carrying the part. Obviously they have them since they are creating new games that still use the same board. Thanks for any tips.
 
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