Speaking of neutral zones, any recommendations for keeping a very nice one safe? Cliffys seem like they're more for preventing further damage, not sure if it's the best option here.

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Get a cliffy on there.

you already have some damage A Mantis is better at preventing the damage to start with but a cliffy will cover up existing dame and provide protection.

Image below is a mantis protector installed on a new board with 0 plays. NOTE: The Mantis in the photo below sits slightly lower the top of the playfield which could result in minor damage to the clearcoat; routing out a tiny portion of the mounting location on the bottom side of the board to bring the Mantis flush with the topside could guarantee that damage would not occur.

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Alrighty, I think I have fixed my issue. Problem was: I have lighted flipper buttons. With time, the PCB for the right side flipper button (that holds 3 LEDs) curled away from the cab, and towards the flipper opto board. It was making contact with the flipper opto board, shorting something.

hey sttng fans , new in the club . i have a question . in the borg ship the 2 lamps are not light up , when should they light up ?

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In test mode, or when the Borg multi all starts.

Yeah, check in the diagnostics.

i have gone in test mode , and they dont light up . c'ant test in multiball , still missing parts i have orderd .

Also check the Flasher menu.

I know when designing my
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stng-a-reargi-prototype
the Borg ship has a flasher mechanism in addition to standard "lamp" matrix mechanism.

Welcome aboard Captain!

They should flash in T8 All Lamps, or in individual lamp test T8 - 56
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no lighting up in all the tests , must be a broken wire .

Going all out to restore a Star Trek Next Gen... will include side blade art, back playfield art, all toys re-painted, full color screen, all led, ending light show, and if that wasn't enough we powder coated all the armor and rails purple and black.

Will show some pics once its all back together.

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Man....they look great! Really hate the plastic look of the toys on this game. Just picked mine up a few weeks ago but not sure how long it will stay. Not a fan...yet.

Give it time, i was unsure about sttng for a month or so. Now its the pin i play the most

yes , my star is ready

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Ok I want to throw my game in the garbage!!!

I have been battling phantom left cannon issues which seem to have come out of nowhere.

When I got this game a couple years back nothing worked properly due to corroded cpu wiring from battery leakage.

The CPU and connectors were replaced and I had gone so far as to replace the cables and both optos on the cannons at that time.

Everything has been 100% up until tonight.

However during gameplay the left cannon will randomly begin moving and repeatedly fires the solenoid and then occasionally won’t find hone position and triggers a credit dot.

I have tested everything, all positioning switches register in the cannon test. Gun finds home. Optos check out.

I have checked every other switch on the row and column and nothing is shorted or triggering anything on the cannon that I can determine. I have banged on the playfield in switch test and nothing seems to be causing anything related to the left cannon to trigger.

Is it possible after all this time the Pinsound board is causing a 12v issue that may be creating this phantom issue?

I am at my wits end with this. Any help on what I am overlooking would be greatly appreciated.

This is a classic symptom of a cannon opto transmitter failure, essentially the game is seeing a closure of the cannon switch telling it there is a ball in the cannon; it could be caused by low 12v to the opto board under the playfield, bad connection to the opto transmitter in the cannon or at the 16 opto board, a bad filter capacitor on the 16 opto board or even a failing LM339 on the 16 opto board.

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Could too many mods occupying the unregulated 12v power supply cause this to happen?

Sure, and easy to test, unplug some of the mods.

Don't see this being the issue, but yeah, unplug them.

1. Quickly indirect opto board for clean connections and cold solder.
2. Take the plastic off the Canon and examine both sides of opto for broken wires.
3. Go into switch edges test. Wiggle each side of the opto switch. If you get a switch hit (open), you likely have cold solder on whichever side triggers. Do the same wiggling with the connectors on the opto board.
4. If nothing triggers, wiggle the canon wiring leading to the optos to look for issues there.
5. If none of that does anything, I'd replace the bulb if you have one. You can buy 100 on eBay for a couple bucks.
6. If bulb is fine, my first suspect would be the LM339. I think that board has three, but you only need to replace two of I remember.

In case you missed in the BF thread:
Pinball-Mods.com is having a site-wide Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale.

All Pinball-mods.com products are 18% off - Must use discount code: BF2018.

All Pinball.Center products and STNG VUK kits are on sale for 10% off - No discount code needed.

All sales will end at 11:59pm on Cyber Monday (11/26/2018). Shipping is not discounted. Limited to stock on hand - No Rain Checks.

Well I got it fixed. I hadn’t thought about the optos in the ball popper mechanism and the second one was indeed intermittent. For good measure and because I have about 100 opto transmitters and receivers I replaced all of the ones pertaining to the left cannon while I had it opened.

You forget how heavy that damn playfield is!

Thanks to everyone who chimed in to help.

I actually got fed up an replaced every opto in the game with fresh "blue" lensed IR transmitters and I haven't had issues since.

ThinkGeek currently has 50% off everything and free shipping with the code DOTCOM - makes this rug about $75 shipped. Nice deal!

Thinkgeek's site is failing to keep up with the web traffic.
I can't order my wants... giving up.

I finally had a chance to put programmable (addressable) LEDs on the ramps of a STTNG using a Pinduino. Been wanting to do this for a long time and am very happy with how it turned out.

Code is open source: https://github.com/elyons/professor_pinball_pinduino_sketches/tree/master/Star-Trek-TNG

Get a pinduino and go nuts!

Would you mind sharing which replacement ships you ordered? I want to do mine, those look so much better! Thanks!

Nice work, not really my cup of tea but I can really appreciate the opportunities for customization. One thought I had during your video was when in a battle mode (Borg or Cardashians (sp?)) and no other shots recently hit it could pulse red for red alert. I know there's no call-out for it but it might be cool if not over-done. Thanks for sharing.

That is a great idea. I'll see if I can figure out a unique combination of flashers/motors that will let me detect one/both of those events (and then something to signal the canceling of them to return the LED ramp lights to "normal" behavior.)

Another idea I'd like to do is to use the pinduino to just drive LEDs in the Borg ship. It would be great to have it green (never understood why it has blue film in its cutouts) in normal play, and then flash red when hit in multiball.

THAT would be hella-cool!

On my STNG RearGI project; I connected up to the lamp and Flasher matrix with an opto matrix. On that project; I made "blue" or "green" borg an option.

The Borg ship is blue because if you watch the episode; the "Type 3 ship" which is based on has blue "windows".

Thanks for the info on the episode -- I'll need to go look that one up and rewatch it. Also, thanks for the link to your thread. That is one hell of a board you made (and I love your Klingon warbird boards). Would be fun to talk shop at some point.

Very true

But for me borg is dark black/silver with green windows. So thats how mine looks

Come to TPF'19; and we can.

In regards to my Ultimate Pinsound mix, The Final Frontier music is not from DS9. It's the Star Trek Generations Overture by Dennis McCarthy. Love that movie.

Thread lurker here. Thinking of picking up a heavy project STTNG. Does anyone know of a populated, or mostly populated playfield for sale? A big plus would be with wiring harness. Or just a separate wiring harness for sale too.

Would love to -- on my to do list, but not sure if it will be this year. I've only heard amazing things about TPF.

Nope to all questions.
I doubt you are going to find any populated PFs. Most smart people will see the project knowing that parting this title is not logical - just too good of a game that can command a really good price.

I have on for sale ... its a fully populated pristine playfield (better than new condition) and 100% operational. I will ship it in a 3/4" plywood cabinet with a glass inspection top layer for only $6000.

but that’s easy to get rid of right? Break it off and throw it away?

Yeah Now figuring that. One of those machines you just never see all termited or falling apart. Or flooded out. Or parted out. Like an IJ ETC. Save it at all costs.

Did you change the receiver as well? Wondering what part number you used with the emitter PN linked above.

I did found this "matched" set.
QED123 https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/?qs=KIIz7VjqD7I4A%252bR7oPm1DQ%3d%3d
QED124 https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/512-QSD124?R=QSD124virtualkey51210000virtualkey512-QSD124

I'd like to use the blue emitters as it seems the Q123(4)s would be fairly easy to mix up with each other. Unless of course the pictures shown aren't correct. Can anyone confirm?

I have personally never had a Receiver go bad. The material used in my machine was probably everything but IR blocking (IE the black color) so it's unlikely the epoxy dome would become IR resistant. I don't think the emitters are usually black; maybe a trick of the camera... or mouser got lazy and used a photo from the receiver on an emitter.

Sadly; It's been several years (read 4+) since I replaced my emitters so I don't have an exact part number handy. I'd think any of these would likely work in our application:
Digikey IR 940nm Emitters

If you look at Digikey: QED123 is clearly pictured as having a light purple or bluish lens... so yeah; Mouser's picture is suspect. The datasheet backs this up: "clear, peach tinted, plastic". Black is NOT correct.

Thank-you guys for the help. Will be ordering some 123s and 124s.

Slowly getting my sttng all shopped out

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Hey Folks! I finally found a STTNG of my very own - I'm amazed at the complexity of this game, I've only worked on 1 EM before this.

It needs a good shop job. That said, the video / dmd is off; anyone have any ideas what it could be? The dots on the display are moving according to animations, but they're all piled towards the bottom of the DMD. I've reseated the ribbon connector and the power connector to the DMD, no change. Where should I check/focus next? Thanks!

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Move associated ribbon connectors while the game is on. Mine gets buggy sometimes because the connection isn't tight enough. If I move the ribbon a little on the board, the problem goes away. Oddly, I also sometimes have to press on the graphics chips on the board. These can loosen from vibration. You may want to pull and reseat. Mine shows a full picture with distortion when I have either of these issues, which is not as bad as what you have here.

If these don't help, go into test mode and do the DMD test, that is, if you can navigate to it. If it's a gassing issue, you should be able to tell with the test. Gassing will have faint dots as well as missing dots. There will be key areas missing with faint dots around them. Hard to tell from your pic. Has it ever fully worked for you? Do you get any more dots than what is pictured? Know a person with a DMD game to swap?

Welcome aboard Captain and CONGRATULATIONS! This remains one of my all-time favorite games.

Its in your best interest to become familiar with the information contained here http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Williams_WPC

For your current issue, look specifically in this section http://pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Williams_WPC#Display_problems

You can also try swapping in parts from your TZ to help isolate the issue.

Thanks Tranquilize, I tried your ideas, physically tweaking things didn't show change. I checked the voltages at the DMD, the 5v and 12v were good.

Since I wasn't getting much progress I punted further investigation until I could talk to some friends about lending their DMD.

As part of going through and cleaning up the machine (it was so dusty!) I'm very happy to report that I pulled the batteries from the board to test their voltages. No leaking. I guess the system was in some sort of bad/corrupted memory state, the display started working after I replaced the batteries. Ran through the tests, replaced a pile of light bulbs.

Game is running, couple of things to do: Neutral Zone hole is worn, so finding a Cliffy for that, the left cannon is not finding home, and the top left corner is dark that I can't see much of what's going on (I'm wondering if there's a burnt bulb I missed there or it's just dark).

Alas, it did not last. The display ran fine for a few hours, and then went scrambled towards the bottom again. Friend of mine has lent me a TZ DMD to swap in and rule out if it's the DMD or something else. It seems whatever is supposed to drive the Y position of the pixels is failing to do so, so the dots are all rendered in a stack at the bottom. I took a short video clip of it, I'll post shortly.