Hello Everyone,

I've had an ongoing issue (years) with my DMD that I haven't seen posted before. At some point in history my display started outgassing pretty badly so I decided to upgrade it to an LCD and also replace the board with an Xpin XP-WPCDMD-CTRL. The issue appeared instantly and I wasn't sure if it was the display or the board but I kinda just decided to live with it until I had time to figure out it. Well days turned to years and I finally decided to get on it. I bought a ColorDMD LCD and lo and behold it's the same exact issue so I'm thinking it's the board and maybe I just got a bad one all those years ago. Unfortunately my older one (pin-w-dmd-01-5100 but probably a knockoff) has two cracked 2N5401 resistors (not sure how that happened) and I don't get replacements until tomorrow so I can't do a simple swap out test just yet.

I checked all the voltages on the test pads on the Xpin board and they seem fine (although 12v is reporting 13v and the -100vdc is reporting -90).

In the meantime I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen anything like this? That third photo is really odd to me because it never looks like that to the naked eye and there's no indication of flickering so there must be something happening very quickly that only a camera can pick up. The 4th is what it actually looked like at the time. It's possible that it was just animating from one error to the next when I snapped the photo.

Thanks for looking,
Les

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Thanks,

I actually reseated all the cables just out of desperation. I haven't tested all the fuses yet but was thinking that probably isn't the issue since the voltages are right. I did just order some new ribbon cables because it kinda would make sense that something like a damaged wire within a ribbon would cause such an odd display glitch.

Sorry for the late reply. I was waiting for a new set of ribbon cables to arrive. Well they did and i replaced them all and the problem persists.

The dip switches on the Xpin are:

1: on
2: on
3: off
4: on

I fiddled with different scan rates but that didn't seem to do anything that I noticed. I did run the test mode and all the lines showed properly both horizontally and vertically.

I soldered in the replacement 2N5401 transistors (Q4 & Q5) to the pin-w-dmd-01-5100 to try and Q5 popped in half when i powered up. I figured it was my crap soldering job so I replaced it and tried again and this time Q4 cracked and burned a lil and resistor R5 burnt up dramatically (taking R13 with it since it sits above it).

Now all this could be due to my terrible soldering since I have bad eyesight and shaky hands but I'm starting to wonder if there's something else going on in terms of voltage that maybe the Xpin is able to deal with but is too much for the other one.

I'm going to try to get my hands on another DMD controller board to test with just to be sure (hopefully I don't blow it up) since I have no business soldering on high-voltage anything apparently.

I can't find my original board anywhere. I probably trashed it or lost it in a move because it was well over 10 years ago and I was dumber then. That board had some serious heat issues though and I remember I had to buy some kind of other board to install over it to bypass the burnt part. Come to think of it I've been through more than my fair share of DMD boards on this puppy. I'm going to check all the voltages going into it again.

I just ordered the DMDLux so I'll let you know how it goes when it arrives.

The good news is I used all this downtime to clean and wax the playfield, replace the rubbers and lube up the time expander. I was really neglecting my pride and joy for the past few years.

I got the DMDLux today and installed it, said a prayer, and turned on the machine and it's working perfectly on both the led and ColorDMD lcd!

I never got around to testing the voltages going into the board so there could still be something going on there and maybe the DMDLux handles it better but for now... I'm back in business (after I put the whole playfield back together since I used this downtime to do a deep clean and wax job).

Thanks to everyone for your feedback.