Dongle news and price discount!

[daverob]

To celebrate the achievement of soldering together my 500th card reader emulator dongle I've decided to knock £5 off the price for the rest of March.

The promotional price is available from the PachiTalk auction listing and from the new store page on my website. This discount combined with the current favourable exchange rate means that this is the lowest price the dongles have been offered to US buyers and is equivalent to a 40% discount on the USD purchase price from two years ago!

Also it is likely that shipping rates will have to go up in April. I have tried to resist increasing these in line with the post office rises for the past two years, but I don't think I can absorb another one.


This milestone also means an end to the current design of dongle as I will now need to order a new batch of printed circuit boards, so will be taking advantage of this to make a few design changes. There are no major functional differences planned, as any big changes would be likely to push the price up (which I really don't want to do) so the new version is planned to offer identical functionality to the current version.

The new design is mainly to allow me to optimise it for ease of manufacturing, as the current version is a bit time consuming to assemble. This was my biggest oversight with the original design. I wasn't expecting them to be as popular as they have turned out to be, so I traded a $50 saving in PCB manufacturing costs and a 50 cents per unit saving on the bill of materials for a few awkwardly placed components and more manual assembly. This would have been fine if I was just making a dozen or two for friends, but they are really annoying when you're dealing with batch sizes of 100 units.

There will also be some improvements to the power circuits, adding voltage regulation to the VL supply. This should fix the incompatibility with Sanyo machines that can cause the shooter handle to stop working, and means that I won't have to stock a modified version of the dongle for the affected machines.


If anyone has any requests or ideas for changes that could be easily incorporated into the dongle's design, then feel free to post them here or send me an email or PM. I need to revisit the software to optimise it for a newer version of the microprocessor chip, so might be able to sneak a few minor upgrades in there as well.

I'll post in a separate thread about the development of version 2.0 once I have a hardware design finalised and prototyped. There will probably be a call for some beta testers at this point as well (so owners of Sanyo machines take note).


Finally, I'd like to express my sincere thanks to all of my customers for their continued support, and an extra special thanks go out to Tulsa and Sid for the existence of PachiTalk and the auction site, without which this project would never have reached this milestone.

[daverob]

Slight correction, should now read 'To celebrate the making of the 499th dongle...' as one of the circuit boards let the magic smoke out while it was running the burn in test.

So serial number 500 will have to wait for the first prototype of the version 2 PCB design dongles. I've already ordered a sample run of a couple of dozen new boards and they're being manufactured as I write this, so should have them sometime next week.

Also a quick reminder that there's only two more days of the £5 discount on the dongles, so grab them while they're hot. When this auction listing ends they will be returning to their regular price and the shipping rates will be going up by 50 pence.

[derek1960]

I want two (Need two) where the hell is my son ?
I am old and can't do Paypal things.
Darn kids

[daverob]

I want two (Need two) where the hell is my son ?

Have you looked behind the sofa, I'm always finding stuff I'd thought I'd lost there.

Don't worry I'll put a couple of the £20 ones aside for you until you manage to find him. BTW, if you'd prefer to pay by cheque, postal order, magic beans etc just send me a PM and I'm sure we can sort something out.

[millermaster1]

Thanks Dave, I got my 2 new dongles on Friday and everything is working great!
Keep up the Great Work!

[derek1960]

Thanks Dave, read the posts after i had phoned you

[daverob]

I just got the prototype PCBs for the version 2 dongles delivered this morning, and quickly assembled one by hand (not really that quick as it took nearly 2 hours!).

Programmed the microcontroller and plugged it into my test rig, and all it did was get hot and smoke before the thermal trip in the test rig decided that it was probably a good idea to cut the power before it too went up in smoke.

Half an hour of head scratching later I realised that I'd laid out the tracks on the circuit board with two of the components fitted backwards, and the components that were meant to be getting 5 volts were being fed 18 volts, hence the excess heat and smoke.

There's probably not much point trying to fix this one as all of the components will have been over stressed. Especially seeing as I was intending using this one to do all the important tests on (prior to building a small batch for beta testing).

So here's to assembly attempt number 2. If you haven't heard back from me in the next two or three hours, then I'll be sitting in the corner wearing a dunce's hat quietly muttering to myself.

[compirate]

Yea! It happens to the smart people too!

[mudfud]

darn. so you get smoke, too? I thought that was just a chewy thing.

thanks for posting. I hate it when I burn up electronics. it's so unreversable... like when I smoked both my controller and my dc/dc on my citicar last year...

good to know that electrical geniuses have their days, too.

I am going to closely dissect the cyclic vader today, so hopefully no smoke signals from salinas, california...

you have GREAT sympathy, daverob.

I will be venturing into PIC programming next, for the areChewyPachi, so many hours here, too, of poring over circuits and programming.

[daverob]

Yeah! Success, the second attempt works.

There was a little confusion when the second dongle powered up but showed an error when trying to read from the smart card. But I soon realised that the first dongle had put 18v into the smartcard, so that had been toasted as well. A fresh smartcard and things looked a whole lot better.

So ladies and gentlemen, may I present 'Dongle version 2'.

v1-v2_front.JPG

On the left is the old design, with the new one on the right.

First thing to notice is that all of the surface mount components are on the top side of the board. This will make assembly a lot easier as I can simply place the components and solder them all at once with my new Infra Red Reflow Oven rather than hand soldering each one individually.

The mounting of the capacitor (top right hand corner of the boards) also makes assembly a lot easier on the new boards, and the expansion connector now sticks out the back of the plastic box, meaning that I don't have to cut a hole in the side of the box any more.

v1-v2_back.JPG

On the back of the boards it's a similar story. All the surface mount components have moved to the top side and the zener diodes are now all mounted directly to the circuit board, rather than having to be soldered together and covered in heatshrink sleeving.

There are now two voltage regulators, so that the ball shooter handle enable signal is now properly regulated. This means that there should be no need to modify the dongles to get the shooter handle working on Sanyo machines.

You can see the results of my layout problem, that caused the first prototype's early demise, in the positioning of the voltage regulators. These two components were intended to be mounted so that the metal tabs were away from the circuit board (like the one on the top side of the original dongle), unfortunately I wan't paying enough attention when I designed the circuit board, hence them being mounted with the tabs against the circuit board and a square of masking tape to prevent the metal tabs from shorting out the PCB traces. I probably won't make any changes to this on the production units, apart from using Kapton tape instead of masking tape.

Next step is to run though a comprehensive set of tests, to make sure that this version hasn't introduced any obscure problems, and then make a small batch of sample units and find some volunteers to beta test them.

[monkeyboy]

I'd like to offer my services to put one through it's paces.

Great new design. These small wonders look pretty complex. Keep up the good work.

[rubberratt]

Gratz Dave !!!

Let me know when the new design is ready for sale. I have a 009-1 coming in from Japan in the next few days, and I will be working on the card art until I hear from you.

You are "living the dream"

RR

[daverob]

Let me know when the new design is ready for sale.

There are no plans to put it into production in the immediate future, as I've still got plenty of dongles in stock. These recent postings are really just here as I thought some people might be interested in the redesign process, and the all too common mistakes that occur when trying new things for the first time.

Seeing as this 'version 2' is just a PCB redesign for ease of manufacturing, and a few tweaks to the internal power supply circuitry to make the standard unmodified design work with Sanyo machines, there's no real pressure to rush it into production. Though, once I'm happy with the re-design I may drop the Sanyo modified version and sell the new version alongside the remaining stock of the regular dongles.

All of the planned testing on these new ones is going take a few months to get through as well. Not only do I have a new design that needs to be proved, I still need to invest in some new equipment and master a new production process (solder paste and infra-red reflow, rather than hand soldering).

Once I get to the beta testing stage for this design, I'll make a seperate post asking for volunteers and detailing the testing requirements. So thanks to all those who have already offered their help, keep watching and I'll let you know in time.


BTW to those who enjoy seeing other peoples mistakes, the pictures in my post above show the two diodes near the expansion connector fitted the wrong way round. This wasn't a problem for the quick 5 minute 'does it work?' test, but it caused the voltage regulators to get quite hot when I continued the tests after the photos were posted. Two new diodes (fitted correctly this time!) and a precautionary replacement of the voltage regulators and things are looking a lot better.

There still seems to be an issue with some of the signal driver transistors, as they seem to be running hotter than on the original design dongles. I'm not sure if this is due to heat conduction from the voltage regulators on the back of the board, or if I need to change a few resistor values to compensate for the signalling voltage changes in this design. I'll have a play about with this next week, and if all goes well I'll load the dongle with the proper version of the software and connect it up to a real pachinko machine for the first time!

[mudfud]

what programmable chip are you using? is it a PIC chip?

I have some 16F chips from digikey, and I am waiting for the developer board and programmer. will have to brush off some really old brain cells and figure out how to program in C again. and, I will have to use a windows machine

on advice from my electronics friend, I bought from forest electronic developments, in the UK. do you use them? do they have an actual brick and mortar store?

thanks for posting your process. it makes me appreciate the dongles all that much more!

[daverob]

what programmable chip are you using? is it a PIC chip?

The original (r1.0) dongles used a PIC16F873A, and when my supplier was out of stock of these chips last year, I changed to a PIC16F882 (r1.1 dongles) which is pretty much identical in terms of specification/pinout etc, but did require a few software modifications to get the code to compile, and a minor difference in the I2C interface caused a problem with the smartcards that needed fixing as well.

The version 2 dongles are also using the '882, but when I go to production I'll probably choose the 16F886 as it's only a few pence more expensive and has 4 times the amount of memory. I'm not short of memory as the current software only uses just over half the space in the '882, but I'm considering putting all of the self test and burn in software features into the main build, as it will save time in production and means I only have to program the dongles once rather than with the three seperate builds during testing.

on advice from my electronics friend, I bought from forest electronic developments, in the UK. do you use them?

I can't say I have ever heard of them, even though they are just along the coast from me. I have friends who live nearby, I'll ask them if the address is in a residential or industrial/retail area.

I use the Microchip development/programming tools, they're a little bit more expensive, but I know can get them to work on my Linux machines (using dedicated Linux versions along with windows tools run using WINE/VirtualBox and some third party open-source additions). The development environment is not quite as well integrated under Linux, and took me ages to set up, but it does mean that I don't have to keep a dedicated windows machine for development, and saves me spending half the development time muttering to myself about how windows doesn't do things quite 'right'.

[rubberratt]

Patience is a virtue, and I am caught in a non-virtuous downward spiral

[kmhamel]

Hey Dave,
Have you considered designing a ball counter with your dongle and card reader. It would complete the parlor experience, if you could run your winnings through a ball counter and have it record your credits direct to the smart card. Even a kit where the user has to make their own hopper and just install the electronics. I would get one in a heartbeat and add card readers to all my frames. J

[daverob]

Hey Dave,
Have you considered designing a ball counter with your dongle and card reader.

I have been giving this some thought recently as one of the software updates for the redesigned dongles (should also be possible to re-flash the software on older dongles to add the same functionality if needed). All it would need is a more flexible setup mode adjustment for the value of the external input.

The way I was thinking of doing it was to interface to the ball count sensor on the parlour style ball catchers that are designed to feed the discarded balls that exit the back of the machine back to the parlour ball feeder system.

The ball count sensor would be connected to the external input of the dongle and the new external input settings on the dongle would be adjusted so that one credit is added to the smartcard for every 25 balls counted.

This would work best if a ball catcher is placed under the ball drain hole on the front tray of each machine, as I expect that they will be quite slow to count as the balls drain through the exit of the catcher individually. This way a player can release the excess balls in the shooter tray as they are playing and have them credited back to their smartcard immediately.

I'm not sure I'd have the ability to design the mechanical side of a high speed ball counter, but if you have the patience to wait for a whole tray of balls to be counted through one of these ball catchers, it wouldn't be that difficult to adapt the dongle for standalone operation (It would just need a three digit credit display and power supply connections).

[mudfud]

The original (r1.0) dongles used a PIC16F873A, and when my supplier was out of stock of these chips last year, I changed to a PIC16F882 (r1.1 dongles) which is pretty much identical in terms of specification/pinout etc, but did require a few software modifications to get the code to compile, and a minor difference in the I2C interface caused a problem with the smartcards that needed fixing as well.

The version 2 dongles are also using the '882, but when I go to production I'll probably choose the 16F886 as it's only a few pence more expensive and has 4 times the amount of memory. I'm not short of memory as the current software only uses just over half the space in the '882, but I'm considering putting all of the self test and burn in software features into the main build, as it will save time in production and means I only have to program the dongles once rather than with the three seperate builds during testing.

I can't say I have ever heard of them, even though they are just along the coast from me. I have friends who live nearby, I'll ask them if the address is in a residential or industrial/retail area.

wow. I plan to use the 16F887. don't know how different that is, but I will have a close chip to your dongles in my designs.

they were only $2.80 each from digikey, $10 from forest, in case that's cheaper than your source.

I ordered a flex40 development board and PICkey2 for programming from forest. total was 57 pounds, so it seemed pretty reasonable. I plan to solder directly on the development board, but I have lots more space than your dongle does.

I use the Microchip development/programming tools, they're a little bit more expensive, but I know can get them to work on my Linux machines (using dedicated Linux versions along with windows tools run using WINE/VirtualBox and some third party open-source additions). The development environment is not quite as well integrated under Linux, and took me ages to set up, but it does mean that I don't have to keep a dedicated windows machine for development, and saves me spending half the development time muttering to myself about how windows doesn't do things quite 'right'.

I wish that I didn't have to use windoze myself , but macintosh software is even harder to find. my linux dell mini 9 has been converted to a hackintosh (more stable than ubuntu), and my eeePC linux machine would be underpowered and too low in memory- not to mention that WINE would probably be too much for my little brain.

I am on a steep learning curve about this stuff, holding on to the safety ropes. hopefully, in a couple months I will be able to converse more knowledgeably with you on this stuff.

here's to more prototyping without smoke

[kmhamel]

I have been giving this some thought recently as one of the software updates for the redesigned dongles (should also be possible to re-flash the software on older dongles to add the same functionality if needed). All it would need is a more flexible setup mode adjustment for the value of the external input.

The way I was thinking of doing it was to interface to the ball count sensor on the parlour style ball catchers that are designed to feed the discarded balls that exit the back of the machine back to the parlour ball feeder system.

The ball count sensor would be connected to the external input of the dongle and the new external input settings on the dongle would be adjusted so that one credit is added to the smartcard for every 25 balls counted.

This would work best if a ball catcher is placed under the ball drain hole on the front tray of each machine, as I expect that they will be quite slow to count as the balls drain through the exit of the catcher individually. This way a player can release the excess balls in the shooter tray as they are playing and have them credited back to their smartcard immediately.

I'm not sure I'd have the ability to design the mechanical side of a high speed ball counter, but if you have the patience to wait for a whole tray of balls to be counted through one of these ball catchers, it wouldn't be that difficult to adapt the dongle for standalone operation (It would just need a three digit credit display and power supply connections).

I was thinking of a simple gravity fed system. A box with Three or four troughs being fed into individual sensors. Each time a ball passed through a sensor a counter would be incremented up by 1, giving a total ball count or credit count.
Each trough would be only the width of a pachinko ball, just like a ball lifter, so ball jams would be at a minimum. It wouldn’t take much time for a tray of balls to run through. The only question is, would the sensor be able to detect the balls fast enough.