tilt.blog

Some of you have asked me how to subscribe to my blog. I've added widgets that make it easy to do this. Both are under the terribly designed hamburger menu. Click here: And from there you can find the subscription links:

I've plugged back in the CPU board, and the machine seems to boot reliably. Still the music is intermittent at boot, but I don't know if that's a serious problem yet. I'm still digging. For now, with the stable power supply, I feel most of the back cabinet's boards are mostly sorted out as I only have left the playfield power board, and that will be hard to debug while I'm working out the rest of the wiring issues. Two things that were really bugging me was a wiring issue from the power supply, and the battery backup system. Starting with the power supply wiring, one of the first things I noticed in the backbox was the presence of a bunch of wire nuts: This type of thing in a pinball machine, while not unheard of, is definitely not how it shipped from the factory. It's clear that at some point and time, someone decided to cut one of the power connectors. I can't think why someone would do this, but here it is in my machine. While this might be "good

 So, after mucking around with the CPU, I'm looking at the power supply. The previous owner of this machine doesn't know how capacitors work. It turns out, that almost half the values of the capacitors on this power supply were the wrong value. Perhaps that's the source of lots of my problems. I ordered a kit from someone on pinside.com  (it's easier than farting around on Digikey), and replaced the capacitors. Someone had been there before me, and pulled up a pad or two. I worked around that by running the leads where the traces weren't. (The eagle eyed among you might notice that not all the mounting screws are in place. That seems to be a common problem in my machine – not enough connections to ground. I'm ordering a bunch of screws from McMasterCarr to fix this.) Putting the power supply back in place, and turning on just the power supply has all the test points registering voltages at what I consider "in range". That's good. As I slowly plugge

 I have been debugging lots of problems in the machine. First, some good news, I've gotten the screen working. I've replaced it with a completely new one: I have a few problems with it, but that'll be for another post. Tonight's post is about CPUS. Have Iron, Will Travel Part of debugging the screen has me questioning that the CPU board is in good shape. I'm pretty sure the power supply isn't helping (again, more later), but I decided to take the CPU board out, and see if I could see anything obviously wrong with it. The CPU board was largely in good shape. You will note, there's a battery pack on it. This needs to be removed because, over time, the batteries leak, and put an alkaline all over the board. While this doesn't immediately ruin a board, over time it well. So, that's coming off: Otherwise, as I inspected the board, I didn't see any obvious problems. The capacitors all looked good, the chips all looked good, the transistors all tested w

So, after much futzing about, I've finally managed to print a replacement part: From left to right, the parts are: my left-hand replacement, the right-hand prototype, and the original right-hand ball return. It took me a couple of days to get right, but I think I've settled on a way to do it. PETG vs PLA Besides a few small forays into ABS, generally when I've used my 3D printer, I've printed PLA. I knew I wanted my part to be transparent (or translucent), and from internet research, it seems PETG and ABS offer the better translucent filaments. Besides the new filament, printing something transparent is quite difficult – there's lots of futzing about with printer settings, and this part was no exception. But I can say, I feel like I was quite successful. The part I've managed to print is pretty clear, and it is solid as a rock. I doubt this thing is going to break anytime soon. I've decided to print a second one for the right-hand side, replacing the slightl

 Well, I've started taking apart the playfield, and in the process, dealing with that broken part . Here, I'm going to detail what I've gotten up to trying to fix it. Accurately Modeling The Part In my pinball machine, there are two flippers at the bottom. Both of them have unique guides with unique part numbers: It seems like the left and right side are mirrored images of each other. So, I took the mostly complete right side guide, and scanned it on my neighbor's scanner: From here, I used the ruler scale the image in Fusion360 (cad software), and traced the outline of the part: I was able to recreate a bunch of the dimensions in inches, and they are generally sensible numbers, like 1 1/12 inches, 1/4 inch, etc: From here, I was able to extrude this object into a 3D shape, and get it ready for printing: And I printed the part to test that it would work: Everything lined up perfectly, and the part looks great! Stay tuned for part 2 of this, when I try printing in clear