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They've got the brains. They've got the tools. |
Project 007: Rubbing the Wide Body
12/15/10: Let There be Light!
Twigg's been sick, I've been working too much, and the Pinball Projects have taken a back seat. On this day, we finally got back to paces and picked up where we left off on Genie: trying to figure out why half the lights don't work.
DJ Resolution of The Alphabet Asylum came over to lend a hand (or to make sure we didn't fool around and got to work).
We were a bit lost as to how we should proceed, and knowing we would be doing a lot of internet research, we pulled the Mac Mini into the garage and booted her up for easy access.
We'd received some replies on our pinside.com posting and one of them led to a link that explained how to test the driver board transistors to see if the lights were bad. We just happened to have some aligator clips on hand and produced the necessary tool to pull this off.
Res proved a suitable secretary for this tedious effort, as I kept to the computer, updating the boys on my research. We learned a lot of good, basic stuff about how the transistors work, and I'm not suprised the driver board has the problems it has after we played with it not possesing this knowledge.
The lighting tests were very successful! We tracked down which leads worked, and which didn't. Our next step was to visually check the molex plugs on the leads that weren't working. The plugs are numbered right to left, and after checking them backwards for about twenty minutes, Twigg discovered some contacts that needed to be replaced really bad. That'll be a trip to Radio Shack, indeed.
The others just needed a cleaning, and after they received one, the bulbs lit right up! We had to run a test to see if the lights would work during the game, and decided to play a round together. Res, on his first game ever, took a startling lead, while Twigg's game can best be described by the video link below (link opens in a new window):
Our next step was to find out which transistors were bad and which ones were victim of another ailment. With our Electronics for Dummies book and a video from You Tube, we were able to figure out how to test the transistors properly.
It was a bit confusing at first, because the reading would pop up for a second, then disappear. We argued over the point, read and re-read the instructions, assigned false features to the multi-meter, and even tried sitting through a video of a Japanese guy speaking the-hardest-to -understand-English-ever try to teach us about what were doing wrong.
In the end, we discovered that the multi-meter test probe wasn't attached completely, and that this was giving us the funky readings. We discovered this when the red probe came off in Twigg's hand.
And that kind of ended our evening. We know we have to order some transistors, and we're doing that. I'm confident that we'll get this one running completely in short order. Meanwhile, we'll be revisiting all our other machines and checking the molex plugs for bad connections and corrosion. I think this may be a reason for many of our problems.
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