Re: Star Wars Death Star explosion - Ground and 5V

Gotta second (and third, and fourth) what john said.

You can chase ground problems for hours and days. They are incredibly
frustrating.. Pinballs are always the most sensitive. Like when you
get the operators that don't hook up the ground braid between the head
and the coffin on the older games.. That's the number one thing to
check for. And it manifests itself in a million different ways.

As a rule of thumb I always check to make sure the grounding hasn't been
hacked up/not connected when I start working on a game. Easy to do when
you're also checking for unseated connectors, burnt connectors, flying wires,
and any other weird hacks. Doing this has brought many a game back to life
without having to spend a lot of time "digging in"..

Getting to the root cause of problems is important, though. If wiggling
a connector brings the game back to life it's worth pulling the connector
and seeing if had just worked its way loose, or whether the +5/gnd was
burning up and you just postponed the inevitable (or some other issue).

Kurt

> (Taking a bow) Glad it worked for you, and it WILL work for others!
>
> Trust me, bad common/ground connections cause MOST weird problems...I've
> worked on pinballs and videos for over twenty-five years, and the ones that
> work the best (Williams!!) have by far the best common/ground connections.
> Their boards are multi-screwed to the ground plane (a single metal plate)
> and the plane and the boards are all tied firmly to the cabinet common, and
> the earth ground connection. In fact one common problem with Williams
> pinballs (off -topic but relevant here) is that when there are screws
> missing that noise creeps rapidly into the game!
>
> Get nice 16 - 18 stranded (just for ease in handling, solid wire will work
> as well) gauge wire to tie all your commons together and join it to the
> earth ground connection (green wire on the three wire power cord in North
> America, and green/yellow overseas)
>
> John ;-#)#
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
** To UNSUBSCRIBE from vectorlist, send a message with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the
** message body to vectorlist-request@synthcom.com. Please direct other
** questions, comments, or problems to neil@synthcom.com.
Received on Sun Apr 7 12:47:21 2002