The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Arcade Collecting => Miscellaneous Arcade Talk => Topic started by: Empire on February 13, 2009, 07:33:41 am
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A couple months ago I purchased a dedicated Zombie Raid. At time of purchase it fired up without a hitch, no problems at all. Well, since I was in the process of moving into my soon to be completed new home I had to immediately place this undead behemoth into a storage building. The building is fully enclosed and insulated just currently not heated. By the time I could finally sneak a few plays in while it's in storage the weather outside (and in the building) was considerably colder and I noticed the power supply wouldn't always immediately turn on. The marquee and monitor were on and getting power but the power supply wouldn't fire up until maybe a few tries of flipping the cab's power switch. Fidgeting with connections didn't seem to have much to do with how or when the power supply would turn on. Sometimes it would work on the second or third try and sometimes it might have taken
15 minutes of reseating connections and an additional 2 minutes of staring at it before the actual game would fire up. In the mean time, I eventually bought a new JAMMA power supply unit in the hopes replacing the wonky one once the weather warmed up or once we got it into the new house, whichever came first. Now that the weather has warmed up tho, the damn thing fires up every single time. Here I am holding a replacement power supply in one hand and a working blood soaked game in the other. So are power supplies like this known for being picky at certain temps? Or should I just replace it anyway? My Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, Rolling Thunder (jamma), Gorf mini and even my skill crane game worked well while testing them in the same cold temperatures. Well, I did notice Gorf had lost side to side movement one minute into play but turning it off and then on again cleared it back to normal.
Any ideas?
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Anything electronic can. In fact you need to be particularly careful turning on electronics in the cold because you can break stuff. Parts of the device will heat up faster than other parts and things can SNAP.
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And don't forget that moisture can condense on the circuit boards and compenents because of the temperature & humidity changes.
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How cold can electrolytics go before they get damaged?
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It's not so much as they get damaged but rather their values can change with the temperature. This change can cause things to not work.
The switching power supplies will not work if the caps in the feedback circuit are bad or change in values too much.
RJ
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Some electrolytics can effectively freeze if you get them too cold. I see -20 or -25C as a pretty common "storage temp" spec. Good caps are often good to -40C or -50C when not in operation. Operating temp ranges a little more, and there is a capacitance dependence on temperature. The older the cap, the worse this dependence is likely to be both due to aging effects and the fact that newer caps tend to have better such design characteristics compared to older ones to begin with. If the cap is really far off, it may go out of design tolerances and cause problems.
One big issue with cold caps is that they sometimes get heated up rather rapidly due to ripple current heating the cap internally or due to external heat sources when powered on. If this is done quickly enough, the cap can break at a stress point, which often results in the cap leaking or venting. Device failure would usually result from this due to either the leaking or from the sudden change in characteristics of the cap.
A small failure from thermal effects (which might otherwise not be a problem) might cause the cap to be unable to withstand the voltage or ripple current being applied to it, resulting in further failure. This is more likely to occur as lower spec margins are provided in the design (which is typical of modern designs). Then again, maybe you want to notice the issue quickly.
Of course, condensation at cold temps near freezing is also a major problem, as Ken mentioned.
In general, figure if it's above freezing and things aren't wet, you're probably good. If it's below freezing but above -20C, and condensation doesn't appear to be a factor, you're probably good as far as caps go. Of course, if you're talking about powering up an arcade game in the cold, CRTs also suffer from the whole rapid temp change thing (especially since they've got their own heaters), and failure of a CRT is far more spectacular :)