Friday March 29, 2024


A Buffett of Prototypes
  Posted by: AceBHound on Mar 2nd, 2013 5:34 PM
I'm starting to gather quite the buffet of prototype boards around here. What's even better is many of the designs are actually working quite well! All of the designs so far have been based on pinball circuitry -- a majority of them memory adapters but some PROM adapters too. I just sent off a few totally different designs than what I've done so far. If they work out as I expect them to, they are going to save me some time when diagnosing pinball boards and will also be good candidates for products. Unlike some of the other prototypes I was having made which were tweaks to some of my existing memory designs, it's actually going to be difficult waiting around the 2 weeks for these newest designs to arrive. I'll have to find something else to design or fix.. or actually play some pinball for once :)

One of the new designs has been a project that's sat around for almost 2 years on a breadboard, with a mess of wires running all about. I've almost knocked the thing off of my workbench a few times, which would have been very annoying considering the amount of work that went into it. It was one of the first projects I attempted and pretty involved due to thinking about power consumption/efficiency and trying to follow good design rules. I never really felt it was finished. I finally decided the heck with it, I'm going to shrink it down to as small of a board as I can and have it prototyped. As it stands the prototype won't have been what I had initially intended, but I'm still excited about it none-the-less. If everything works out I can use it to build upon and work more toward the original goal.

A lot of pinball on-the-brain these days, but I could easily see some of this work spinning off into some other creative ideas -- maybe a kid's toy or some "build it yourself" kits for something not even pinball related. I really can't say where it's all going.. but I'm enjoying getting some creative electronic ideas out there, making my life easier while working on repairing pinball machines and possibly having an assortment of products for sale in the near future.



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