Hey all. Fired up the Guardians Premium and all of a sudden Groot started opening and closing his mouth repeatedly and kept trying to spit out balls that were not in there. Eventually it stopped and I got an error that said “Operator Alert Groot Lockup Device Malfunction.” Went into the switch menu and none of the 4 optos are working. If I unplug the receiver board, his mouth stops moving. Obviously either the transmitter board, receiver board, or both boards are bad. I’ve had this machine for nearly a year. I personally know someone else who had this same exact issue on a Pro but it happened as soon as they got it. The transmitter board also only had one screw holding it secure. Typical Stern quality control. Anyway, anyone else experience or hear of this happening before? I don’t want to replace the boards if there is some other issue that possibly took them out. Thanks for your time and help - Mike.

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Update on this. I automatically assumed the opto boards were bad since I personally know someone who had this same issue and it was their opto boards, so I jumped to that conclusion. Decided to look further into things and I actually had SIX tech alerts...

1) Left ramp exit (opto)
2) Left Groot Target
3) Left Orbit Switch
4) Groot Lock (optos)
5) Groot Uplock Malfunction
6) Right Flipper EOS

After giving everything a look over and verifying the issues, I found a broken ground wire on the Left Groot Target. There are two ground wires soldered to the target switch and one of them had broken off due to bad Stern quality control (the solder was sub par at best). Turns out that broken ground wire was the cause of ALL the issues with the exception of the EOS. That had a broken contact arm. Replaced the switch and fixed that issue. But except for that, all the other issues ended up being that one broken ground wire. I was surprised that many items are looped together like that on a modern game.

Anyway, just wanted to share that this issue was resolved. Thanks.