Arcade Collecting > Pinball

STTNG electrical problems (switches/opto's)

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Cenobyte:
Tonight I was playing my "new" STTNG and the pin suffered from a reset 3 or 4 times. It hasn't done that before?!  :-[

It happens when the bal draines between the flippers. I think I might also activated both flippers when it happened, but I'm not sure that happened every time it resets. In the half hour I played it happened 4 times...

What could cause this?

Cenobyte:
Since the pin had been sitting in a cold & damp barn for the last 2 years before I bought it (2 weeks ago) I think a bad connector might just be the problem. Would it be smart to check all connectors on the power driver assembly one by one? Being a rookie: what would be a smart way to clean these connectors safely & efficiently?

Cenobyte:
Reseating the connectors seemed to work perfectly at first -no more resets after an evening playing- but yesterday I had a bunch of friends over and after 45 minutes of pinball fun the machine went totally berzerk. The cannons kept swinging while the machine told the player to shoot a ball that was not there, balls kept coming in front of the plunger and eventually the display filled itself with diagonal lines, followed by a total reboot with everything repeating itself...  :cry:

Running the test mode I could check the switch matrix and I noticed half a column of switches flickering on and off rapidly (I think it was the column which held the opto's) giving me the idea that this too had something to do with voltage not being high enough somewhere.

Since I'm not capable to solve this complicated stuff myself, I'm going to catalog the connectors and remove my power driver assembly board and take it to somebody who knows what he's doing. I mean: soldering two wires together will probably work out fine for me, but I'm not going to risk destroying my board by fooling around with my soldering iron.  ;D

Cenobyte:
Well, the story continues...

The driver board has received new components and I've checked the connections on all connectors. Still the problems remain, however they're different now:

-opto's in gun (ball detectors) do not work
-4 switches under both guns (detecting closed state and open state) do not register on switch matrix
-opto Borg entry (just in front of the plunger, for ball detection) does not work
-opto Borg just before turn to plunger DOES work
-all optos for ball detection in ball holder DO work
-opto's that detect balls below playfield at the guns do not work (I checked one and it did not register)

Yesterday I had this happen when I blocked the opto in the left gun:
http://gallery.me.com/cenobytez#100583/IMG_1944

Today, this opto did not work anymore...

The big resistors on the 16-opto board get very hot, is that normal?

All in all the opto's seem to cause the problems. Not the opto's themselves (some work on one day but stop working on other days) but the control board (16-opto board). Strange thing with this pin is that the 16-opto board was broken when I bought it. The seller swapped it with another sttng that he had and after that the machine worked for 2 weeks. What I ask myself is: what killed the 16-opto board in the first place? It looks like that problem is still present and now also killed my second opto board. OR the 16-opto board is still fine, but something else is (and was) causing these problems...

smartbomb2084:
You need to tell us the actual switch NUMBERS of the problem switches as they are labeled in the SWITCH MATRIX.  The numbers make identification a LOT easier....

From what you are describing it seems that ALL of the switches in Switch Matrix Column three are not registering?

Take a digital camera or cell phone camera and point it towards the emitter half of the opto (green board) and see if the emitters are glowing like the sun through the camera. If they aren't take a flashlight and shine it toward the receiver of the opto (blue board) and then block the light and see if the switch works.

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