Bad solder joint somewhere?

Hey sometimes the opto beam will be blocked by the gates on the left and right that hold the mist ball. Try bending them up a bit. Fixed mine and a few others that way. The beam may be reflecting against the ball gate sometimes.

I had one of GLM's opto boards for the castle ball lock, and I was having an issue where the optos were being triggered as 2 - 1 - 3 instead of 1-2-3. HomePin's board fixed that issue.

Bottom line, I would be very cautious of anything g with GLM on it now - especially if you heard nothing back.

Just saw this thread.

To OP, not sure I ever got an email about the issue. Sometimes I just don't get emails that customers send, sometimes I'm just far too busy to get to it and it falls off the radar. Best thing to do is just keep emailing.

The problem you are describing sounds an awful lot like the issue we have with TOM and the 7 opto board, a problem which is unique to that particular game (as far as I know). This is where they (Williams) used the opto switch board sub-harnesses (which should in theory ONLY be tied to the playfield optos) to drive power and ground to the left eddy sensor (instead of just using the standard power/ground lines running around the playfield.

On the GLM opto switch boards, the sub-harnesses do not have a true ground, so anything that might be trying to use it (as it exists on the factory board) will probably not work as expected and jitter.

I don't know what homepin device you are using in your game or how it may be wired in, but in the past few years there have been more compatibility issues cropping up as new aftermarket suppliers come to market and as customers add more and more mods to their games. It's a lot to keep up with!

As for the castle lock swap issue, this was discovered very early on in the development of the 10 opto board. BSD is one of the games that has a known factory wiring issue (the lines to the transmitters are swapped). It doesn't affect the factory board since the optos are powered on all of the time. But since the GLM board switches them on/off one at a time (to conserve power and prolong the life of the optos), it requires the transmitters to be wired in correctly so that they are pointing at the correct receiver.

We were able to correct the issue in the 10 opto board's firmware, but there are boards out there that may not have the updated firmware to correct for it. Most boards can be sent back to have their firmware updated (we can also generally do this at shows too).

The other simpler option is to just correct the wiring harness to what it should have been, which would be beneficial for future troubleshooting purposes anyway. It takes about 2 minutes to do.

Hope that helps explain things.

Tony

_{Post edited by GLModular: Corrected a few technical things.}

Thank you, Tony, for chiming in on this topic. It definitely speaks well of you to come address these issues. Confidence definitely restored.

Too bad the board I had is long gone. Oh wells =/