Hello friends. I am not an electrical engineer by any means and I really don't know what I'm talking about, so please keep that in mind. I bought a 99 Golden Tee game and got it fixed up and working from a guy that fixes arcades. It was working perfectly for like a month, but the trackball just stopped working. At first, it wouldn't roll down, and any downward movement would make it go up. For example, I could roll the ball down to go from 1 player to 2 player, but if i tried to roll it up to make it 1 player, it would act like it was going down and move to 3 player. Now, it isn't working at all, except when I first turn it on it seems to work for about 5 seconds, and then it doesn't roll at all.
Any advice?
Sounds pretty odd.
Physical checks:
- Do the rollers/bearings turn easily?
- Is each encoder wheel secured to the roller?
- Is there any dust or lint blocking the Red Board's optical circuits? (U-shaped black part that the encoder wheel passes thru)
Trackball wiring:
Make sure the "frame ground" heavy green wires with a ring terminal is connected to ground.
- The trackball generates a static charge while rolling.
- If you don't dissipate the charge to ground, it can build up enough to damage the optical circuit boards.
Red wires = 5v
Black wires = ground.
Yellow and Green wires are data lines for one axis.
Blue and Purple wires are data lines for the other axis.
When you *slowly* turn the roller+encoder wheel for one axis clockwise, the spokes will block and un-block the IR LED and photo transistor (commonly called "optos"), producing a "1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 . . ." quadrature waveform like this on the data lines.
If you turn the axis counter-clockwise, it will produce a "4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 . . ." waveform.
If both data lines for an axis alternate between logic high and low, the optical circuit for that axis is OK.
- Both data lines have to be working to register a turn of more than one step.
- No quadrature waveform transitions = no turn.
- Only one data line working = wobble back and forth one step.
Set your multimeter to voltage.
If you don't have a nice set of multimeter probes, you can use straight-pins pushed into the housing from the wire side.
Scott