Wizard of Oz
Jersey Jack, 2013You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider bobukcat.
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Quoted from audihere:OK thx!, I’ll try to narrow it down. I’ve done this several times before for completely Off chains of lights. This is the first time I’ve gotten flickering failure instead of Off.
The process to resolve it is exactly the same, go into to the ordered LED test and move through until you find the first one that starts the string flickering, the last one that works properly is most likely your culprit.
Quoted from audihere:Here's a pic showing a circle around the lights that are flickering during attract mode when the whole playfield should be a single color (green for this pic). It's about 1/2 of the playfield.
I'm going to try wiggling some connectors as recommended.
[quoted image]
I suspect it's the Rainbow board, try jumpering past / disabling that one first.
Quoted from PinRetail:QUOTE: " Also, while 2.0 is a much better design, it’s still fairly advanced microelectronics (and not simple incandescent lights controlled by a transistor or triac) so I would not bet on these working perfectly after another 8 years either so the $800 plus significant work isn’t a lifetime guarantee.
(shrugs) Lifetime guarantee isn't where anything is in pinball...
The Gen1 lighting depended upon a very specific microchip that was only on the market for a few years. Instead of the computer sending a signal to the chip to tell it to light up, the computer addressed the first light chip in the line, and passed the signal from the first light chip in the line to the second light chip in the line until it got to light chip N, which is the one it was intending to light up.
This design meant that every single light chip had to be working perfectly, and every connector into each light chip board and out of each light chip board had to be working perfectly.
Connectors fail in pinball, microchips can fail and they were also in Gen1 running the LED's at a really high level of brightness so the LED's wore out faster than their normal 10,000 hour half life. The LED's I pulled weren't a very good white... they had faded a bit to purplish white due to the LED's wearing out.
The Gen2 design takes standard communication signals, and lights up some LEDs. A design very similar to Stern's 'node' system. It's a much more fault tolerant design, and it'll be an easy system to replace twenty years from now because it doesn't depend upon anything but standard communication chips and LED drivers that are available from dozens of suppliers.
In my case, my WOZ had been on an amusement route for a lot of years, and all the connectors were flakey due to the shaking of years and years of 24 hour play. In home use, you won't see ALL your connectors get flakey for a lot longer... but it WILL happen eventually.
The microchips in your WOZ light boards are no longer available. The light system will have to be replaced eventually.
I made the decision to replace my light system, and I'm really glad I did.
I have had a couple of the single 2.0 single LED GI boards lose a color (which means they can't actually do white anymore) already. I don't know if others have experienced this but I've never had a similar problem with my Houdini or my one Stern LED game.
Edit: those games don't use RGB for GI but I've never had one of the insert RGB leds fail in any way on any of them.
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Santa Maria, CA