The printed circuit boards I’ve been working on have arrived from the fabricator. I am absolutely thrilled with how they turned out. I’m still waiting on a bunch of parts to start assembling and testing the designs but this is a huge step in the direction of releasing some commercial products that will make the life of the pinball restorer easier.

The 2 boards on the top are for the Bally/Stern lamp driver board tester project. The board on the left is the LED board that will connect to the SCR outputs and the board on the right will drive the decoders and connect to a PC via USB.

The board on the bottom right is a USB based replacement for the Bally 6803 keypad. This board will allow programmatic setting of adjustments on the 6803 series pinballs. I’m expecting this to be a godsend to many people (myself included). Making adjustments on these games can be a real pain and the idea of entering all of the setting in a form on a computer and clicking a button to set them all is very attractive.

The last board on the bottom left is something that I designed to allow me to connect a microcontroller to the CPU socket of a Bally/Stern MPU. This is far from a finished design but it will allow me to start developing what I hope evolves into a very cool interface. I’m hoping to replace the Motorola 6800 CPU with a modern microcontroller with USB interface to allow for creation of new rules and interfacing with a computer (mainly for sound). I will share more info on this project in the future.