Even so I wouldn't think it would hold the coil on. Thats typically a short pulse measured in milliseconds.

I'm thinking there was an issue with the driver transistor locking on. Have not yet heard of it on WOZ but it is a pretty common thing to have happen. Just usually when they lock it's permanently. Whats wierd is that he was mentioning that it only has happened a couple times and the ball search releases it.

BTW... What software version are you running?

Yep, that's probably the best contact. Support is typically more interested in solving the problem immediately at hand, not always root cause analysis and they might not pass it along unless it's occurring with a certain amount of frequency. I think since this sounds like something that can be prevented via a code update, Keith would be much more interested, especially if we can include some sort of evidence along with it. I'll see if I can reproduce on my WOZ tonight (not as far as burning my coil, but to demonstrate the trap).

Good news for those worried about having to babysit their games for this (albeit rare) occurrence. I haven't reviewed the video yet and may still shoot a slow motion shot to add to it, but this does not appear to be a software issue. While I can not completely rule it out given my limited testing here is what I found:

1. This can really only possibly happen during multi-ball because the game only resets the Winki with a ball secured in the castle VUK hole.

2. If you by chance have a ball directly over the Winki while it is resetting, each reset fire counts as a shot towards knocking down the Winki's.... What happens is that it fires reset, senses Winki down, counts a hit, and resets again (between 1 - 3 times depending on how many Winki's are up). This is of course dependent on a properly adjusted Winki down switch.

So at MOST, the coil will only fire up to a maximum of 3 times rapidly. For the coil to continuously fire there would need to be something wrong with the game.

I think it could be a bad switch, but even then the delay between fires SHOULD give the ball plenty of time to escape.. it's fast but not THAT fast. Also, if this is happening it would be a very loud and apparent. So given that, there very well could be something wrong with the driver board to cause it to hold on the coil like that.

Wait... correction... I did just replicate it... details soon, this is a software bug.

Dang my giant hand is in the way of the shot so I will have to try another angle but this appears to be what is happening... now that I think about it there may be another way to replicate this scenario, and it *might* be possible with one ball.

Here is what I observed:

1. Ball goes into VUK
2. VUK up kick fails due to unstable ball (hits the wire and bounced back towards Winki)
3. Winki gets knocked down around the exact same time and the failed up kick ball rolls over the Winki just as it's resetting.

The result is a ball locked over the Winki and I could clearly hear an electrical hum from the coil. It ran for a good second before I quickly knocked the ball out of there, but it's clearly possible. Will try to nail down the conditions with a better angled video.

Alight got a nice clear video of it... going onto youtube now.

Weird thing is that this time I managed to capture it with the exact same circumstances that in the past resulted in a normal (non-locking) reset. I'm kind of wondering if perhaps my switch needs to be adjusted now....

Anyway... maybe what the circumstance is is that if the Winki down has too much stroke past the switched position, it will never reset high enough with a ball there to clear the switched position and the coil will hold. The thing is that this is a very minute adjustment... so even if it is a switch adjustment issue, I think the software should be able to account for it by simply ALWAYS pulsing the reset and not relying on the Winki down switch position... possibly with a short (200ms or so) delay before reading the switch again.

I have not yet sent it to him, but will do. I'm waiting for Youtube to cancel the video stabilization "fix"

Thanks! I believe I am... at least it didn't get bounced back to me like my email to Jen... congrats to her BTW!

Yeah, exactly my thought too elf... in a home environment there is a good chance it will be caught and stopped before doing damage... but on location there is nobody to stop it and it will have to wait for ball search. If it's enough to melt the sleeve and the wrapper, it wouldn't take much longer to start a fire. I would hope something else would blow (ideally fuse) by that point though.

Oh yeah, that smell is horrible. We had to evacuate our building a day one time after a small electronics fire.

The guy who worked in the cube next to me was preparing to call in a warranty repair on a failed UPS and powered it up to check for any error codes. The next thing I heard was "OH S***!!!" And I saw him running out with the UPS, fire was shooting out the exhaust fan and belching out a thick black smoke. He got it up the stairs and out of the building where it died.

The funny part was the next day people in another department questioned the UPS delivery driver asking him if he was alright because they heard he had caught on fire.