Out of the blue, left side GI went out just the other day. Pretty sure, but not sure that i have it traced to a bad connector, or pin also. J121 #11. Connector looks a bit burnt. Never replaced a connector or repinned before. Is it possible to pull that wire and "bypass" the connector and replug the connector with the stripped wire touching #11 pin to verify the problem? Can't imagine the pin is a problem, connector, yes. Thoughts?
Quoted from LTG:Did you lose through board continuity on one of the pins soldered to the board ?
LTG : )
Honestly don't know Lloyd. Not the best pinball tech. I can do some soldering, basic troubleshooting and some general repair. Heck, I don't even have a multimeter. I did try playing a game over the weekend even tho it's a little dark, and now when you start a game, it plays fine for about 5 seconds, then the machine shuts off and then restarts?? Did it 3 times, so then I gave up. Stumped
The playing fine and restarting is probably a completely different issue related to your 5v being low. And the pins can totally be an issue! It's not the pin itself unless it's burnt really bad, it's a broken solder joint on the back of the board. Do you know what color wire the left side illumination is?
Quoted from CadillacMusic:The playing fine and restarting is probably a completely different issue related to your 5v being low. And the pins can totally be an issue! It's not the pin itself unless it's burnt really bad, it's a broken solder joint on the back of the board. Do you know what color wire the left side illumination is?
Believe the left side GI wire is white/violet. Not 100% sure. I'm at work. The pin restarting issue I've never had happen on any machine before. Likely have to have someone come out
You might try a kahr.us board first. just type kahr.us into your address bar and look for the WPC Power Fix Daughter Board. Jeeze, I sound like their salesguy on here. But it's like $30 including shipping, and fixes this problem for most machines.
Quoted from CadillacMusic:You might try a kahr.us board first. just type kahr.us into your address bar and look for the WPC Power Fix Daughter Board. Jeeze, I sound like their salesguy on here. But it's like $30 including shipping, and fixes this problem for most machines.
Looked into that Daughter Board. Sounds like it's more for diagnosing than a fix. Doesn't have a great description. Where exactly does it plug in? Never tried anything like this
The board goes where the female power plug normally goes in the mpu, and has that plug go into it. So it kind of stuck between the board and the plug.
The problem with resets is that the game's 5 volts are pulled too low, due to strain caused by the higher voltage solenoids. They only cause the voltage to drop by about .2v. The thing is that some chips start acting weird at that low a voltage. There's a special circuit put in, called a watchdog circuit, that will say "STOP! Reset this game!" if the voltage gets below a certain point. And that point happens to be 4.85 volts.
So there's two versions of the board, the normal and the deluxe. The normal version takes the 12 volts, which doesn't drop as low when strained, and converts it into 5 volts. This means all of the mpu board, which includes the watchdog circuit, always has a strong 5 volts. So it stops resetting.
The deluxe version does everything the normal version does, but it will also light up little lights to tell you if it was needed or not. This can help you diagnose what's causing the voltage drop, or just let you know the health of the 5v system.
The alternative to these boards is rebuilding the 5v path of your driver board. The voltage is dropping low because the parts are old and drifting outside of the normal operational limits. It can be a pain in the butt, though, and may not solve your problems.
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Great to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/roadshow-left-side-gi-out and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.
Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.
Burnsville, MN