RE: G-08 rebuild kit potential BOM

> If soldering stations are on charter, why not thermal imaging
> for fixing vector boards ?

Heheh, true enough. With our arcade power bills hitting $1200/mo I can't
help but think about power consumption more and more. ;-) A good number of
years ago (egads, back when I had my Battlezone in at work!) I started
looking into getting heat/power out of the cabinets as a preventative
measure.

Here's a link to one run...

http://www.embeddedengineeringllc.com/arcade/BZ_temp.GIF

That was a couple of single channel dataloggers watching the temperature in
the "middle" of the cabinet and right by the deflection board. The problem
of course is that temperature probes really only give you data for where the
probe is. ;-) (and the batteries can crap out like they did at ~4AM on the
top trace)

We (at Ground Kontrol) are a little sensitive to the heat issue because it
feedsback... more power consumption = more heat = more A/C to compensate =
more power again. Then there's the maintenance aspect of stuff just getting
toasty and failing prematurely. Not really a big deal on modern boards
(most JAMMA stuff), but for older stuff with poor quality (by today's
standards) PCB's, solder, and components... Just as soon keep that old stuff
running with less downtime.
 
> How often do you think you would use this ? Maybe it would
> be enough, at least for some testing, to find a local college
> lab (or local business) with an arcade enthusiast where you
> could trade use of a camera in exchange for tokens ?

Yeah it's probably not a "use everyday" thing, hence why I'm leaning towards
something inexpensive. I'm *kinda* convincing myself that it's a good took
for my "day job" (which at the moment is designing embedded computers for
arcade games and industrial applications). It's just a nice insurance
policy to be able to take snapshots of a design ~5s apart and watch the temp
of inductors, regulators, diodes, etc. and see how on-board heat
sink/cooling techniques are (or are not) working.

On a larger scale though I'm curious to see how my cumulative "little
changes" add up to the big picture. My "dePROM" board on the new SW/ESB kit
might take ~3W or so off the 5V rail on some machines by getting rid of the
bipolar PROMs, plus getting rid of ~10 or so 100mA EPROMs, NOVRAM, etc.
saves power. The nice thing about dropping 5V load is that it's
post-regulator power, so it definitely helps the heat cooked off at the
AR-II even more... Then there's little trade-off tests... If I add a 12V DC
fan drawing __mA to cool the cabinet, is that a net win for overall cooling
vs. the power consumption, etc.

I'm also curious to try putting some additional heatsinks and/or surplus CPU
coolers (fans or peltier junctions) on/near deflection transistors in the
'6100 and see what overall effect they can have for cooling the actual
transistors. (and stuff like Jed Margolin's idea to do the switching
pre-regulator to null out wall voltage effects across the transformer,
etc...)

I also kinda like the thought of doing a pin compatible switching regulator
version of the AR-II as an easy plug-n-play replacement. But I'd like to be
able to demonstrate some clear before/after improvements which would be
easy(ier) with thermography.

Anyway, interesting stuff to mess with.

-Clay

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Received on Sun Jul 27 15:21:00 2008