Puzzle for you experienced guys - customer support at a distance

[jimmer]

I sent a Defender fightstick to a friend, got him going on MAME over the phone. All good.

The fightstick uses the KADE AVR.
Up and down are default up arrow and down arrow.

He says that sometimes in game ship won't move down, other controls work so he ends up stuck at the top of the screen. He can hear the switches clicking both up and down. It's a zippyy stick with micros.

The only things I can think of so far are:

bad spade connections to the microswitch
bad connection into the keyboard encoder
bad microswitch
bad earth daisy chain (need to check if down is end of the line, I didn't complete the loop)

Anything else?

He's gonna try shaking it next time it happens.

[Sarver Systems]

Bad connector on the board end?

[harveybirdman]

Doea it move down with greater pressure?  Or is it truly interrmintant?

[Sarver Systems]

Does it occur for only 1 game, or all games?

[paigeoliver]

If it is not always happening then it is probably a bad microswitch. My most recent multiwilliams had a switch go bad like that on a brand new joystick as well (oddly enough it was also the down switch and it first showed up while playing defender). Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. Swapped out the switch and poof the problem was gone.

[jimmer]

I've not heard from him since this morning, so maybe he wiggled the connections and it hasn't happened since.

The info was that it had happened 3 times, and it stayed like it to the end of the game. I didn't clarify with him if he exited to the menu and whether down was working then. Or what he did between it not working and it working again. Have to try that if he calls back. As my ideas above indicate, I can only think of mechanical causes up to the encoder.

He is only interested in 1 game, Defender, even though I set him up with left/right buttons for Galaga he insists he's not going to play it!  This does mean that there are 2 spare microswitches he can try if that does turn out to be the most likely cause.

I was in two minds whether to spade or solder this, and still am for the next one.   I chose spades mainly because the earth daisy chain looks neat and is easier than soldered solutions.  Solder would mean I wouldn't be worried about the connections coming loose in transit. But solder would also make it hard for him to swap out a microswitch, which wasn't something I'd even considered before.

[jimmer]

He called back today, Down still intermittently stops working. Crucially he had noted that it stops clicking.

First got him to check clearance between the stick and the panel hole when it clicks (it was working again). It was fine.

Then I got him to swap out the switch (very handy that I had a photo of the underside, and I used diferent colour wires - will stick with that in future). As he was removing the push on connector it fell off, the terminal had snapped off from the switch. And as you know, the terminal goes through the wall and becomes the switch contact inside. I struggle to picture a state that could work intermittently before total failure but apparantly that's what was happening.

So, all sorted over the phone, which is the main thing.

Still not sure about push-on versus solder.  Was veering towards solder, but what I just did over the phone would have been a lot harder with a soldered panel.