Re: Why the LED fascination?

pincorrect <icorpla@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:1f1d01cd-6723-4c0a-8ed2-
f4720e8d2c40@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On Nov 17, 3:09 pm, TheKorn <TheK...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

pincorrect <icor...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:0dde0d7d-8748-4c4b-9fd7-
3cd3b1096...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Advantages of LEDs:

* generate significantly less heat

This reduces wear and damage to the playfield

What are you basing this statement on?

The most notorious enemy of electronic components is heat.

Why are you jumping to the electronics? I thought you were talking about
the playfield.

When I
said "playfield" I was referring to the overall game

Whatever.

but it could
also be argued that the reduced heat dramatically decreases the chance
of playfield plastics and inserts becoming warped.

Well, you could argue that. But the problem with that argument is it
takes a *long* time for the heat level to build to a detrimental level on
a playfield in typical home use, approaching "never".

Of course, in commercial use that answer is entirely different.

This reduces wear on the circuits and power supply

Unfounded speculation. There is no evidence that a 50% loaded power
supply runs shorter than a 20% loaded power supply. It's not an
engine
with rotating parts; it's solid state.

I would expect someone like you to know this already. There are
plenty of games that were poorly designed, such as the WPC systems
where the GI connectors and board traces were not properly rated to
handle the voltages going through them.

That is not a power supply problem, that is a connector problem. Similar
to the problem above where you confused a playfield and a complete
machine. Connectors aren't electronics, in the same way that the plug
you use to connect your computer to the wall isn't an electronic part,
either.

As for the traces, they are properly sized; you're talking out of your
ass there.

Switching to LEDs reduces the failure rate.

Again, this hasn't been proven by *anyone*, this is just conjecture on
your part. Nobody has even attempted to test this (to the best of my
knowledge).

Higher use = higher temperature = shorter lifespan.

If you're talking about engines, you're right. We're not talking about
engines, we're talking about electronics.


The largest relevent study I can think of was an analysis done by google
on their umpteen hundreds of thousands of hard drives, available here:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf



"We first look at the correlation between average temperature
during the observation period and failure. Figure
4 shows the distribution of drives with average temperature
in increments of one degree and the corresponding
annualized failure rates. The figure shows that failures
do not increase when the average temperature increases.
In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower
temperatures are associated with higher failure rates.
Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal
of this trend."

And later...

"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent
pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature
drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels."



What google did find in their study is that it wasn't really temperature,
but rather operational life that dramatically affected the probability of
failure.

This dovetails nicely with our collective experiences in pinball
machines. Yes occasionally people have to replace bridges and what-not
in power supplies. But these are *old* bridges or *old* regulators or
*old* caps. Devices that have been on many tens of thousands of hours!

If temperature really were the base issue, then you'd replace a bridge
and it'd die again in a year. Or you'd replace a cap and it'd fail
quickly. That's not what happens; people blow a bridge and they replace
it and they never replace it as long as they own the machine, or in
commercial use, you blow a cap and don't replace it again for another
eight years. That wouldn't be possible if *temperature* were the
limiting factor.


When the real world hard numbers results combine with the anecdotal
evidence to point to the same conclusion, sorry but your conclusion can
only be considered wrong.



(I'm ignoring the parts of your post that are opinions presented as
facts. You have a right to your opinions, though I'm starting to
think
you're just trolling on purpose.)

Nawww, if I was trolling I'd ask you how high you were when you
thought it was a good idea to connect a guitar hero controller to a
pinball machine?

Wow, classy.

I wasn't high at all. The near 700 plays that were put on the game
during expo seem to indicate that others thought the idea had merit as
well.
.

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