assistance on next path for stuck on lights - baby pacman

The ones that are not working with LEDs are randomly around the playfield and none seem to be in any particular group. In the pic below the wires going to the lamps are circled in red. Bulbs with the problem are spread across the 3 connectors. I see some of the diodes (maybe transistors?) to the right of the SCRs have been replaced. I will pull the board and see what I can find by following the traces.

4880155169_8a09bf968e_z.jpg


Noticed something very wrong when i powered it back up tonight though, The monitor now has a blue tint to it and when I go to start a game the drop targets go into a resetting loop. Looking at the guide it seems to be a SE9302 transistors (TIP102 replaceable) on Q36 that triggers the drop target reset. I will check that as well when I pull the board. The blue tint to the monitor scares the crap out of me though.

Lindsey, when you mention

I would be curious to see if all of the LEDs that are not working are on one half of the AC or the other
Click to expand...

I am not really following. I am quite the noob when it comes to this kind of stuff.
UPDATE: I get it now.

Thanks for the assistance so far though.
 
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Not proud of this post, but going to explain it all so it might help.

solved
The blue screen and drop target reset.
In this thread was the very beginning of my working on my own boards. I spent most of last weekend doing a bunch of board work and loved it. Along the way I learned the hard way. A SCR that had been replaced many times before from the marks I could see gave up when I tried. I ended up just soldering a jumper wire to the G leg and to where the trace went solder point. I had a few brews and marked where I was going to solder the other end of the wire by touching the iron on it to make it shine. Went and did some husbandly stuff and did not double check before I soldered later that eve. I hit the wrong point. I am betting that made the screen blue tinted and fried the SCR once again. Replaced with a wire jumper to the correct place and that issue is fixed.

The drop target reset was just a case of switches that got hit while I was working on that tiny ass and strange playfield.

LED Issue
The issue is still persisting, but I have eliminated the light / solenoid board from being a cause of it.
I know of the horror stories about BPM. I have been picking up spare parts from KLOV and ebay just in case. I had an extra lamp / solenoid board that I got from ebay as "tested". I knew it was prob pretty messed up and put it in the storage room about a year ago. I bought it cheap even before I knew what the different boards were. My wife, who actually listens to me blabber on about this stuff remembered that I had bought a board for the machine. It was the one I was looking for :)

I pulled it out and tested it with the DMM. I now almost know how to use a DMM a bit more and ended up replacing 4 SCRs and checked all the rest of the main parts of the board. I put the new board in and I am right back at where I was. Some lamp sockets will not take LED bulbs. I even found another type of LED and did full tests and nothing. Incandescent still work fine.

conclusion
By eliminating anything on the lamp / solenoid board being the issue I think the most logical conclusion is that the lamp sockets or wiring must not be able to produce enough power to ignite the LEDs. I could see one I was messing with slightly glow and it was not reflection from other LED lights, but it was really weak. I found pinballresource and can switch the lamp sockets out along with a flipper rebuild.

Is there something I should check with the DMM to see if it is putting out the right power before replacing sockets? I can look up how to check something, but if you would be willing to give basics on what to set my DMM to it would be very appreciated. These last couple weeks have been a crash course for me and I am getting a lot of it. Pinrepair is awesome along with the pinball ninja.

My DMM
4852808969_622f1b497b_o.jpg


I really have a love / hate relationship with this machine. I sorta jumped on it before I knew much. Troxel hooked me up and have tons of fun with it. But it is the strange uncle of my arcade. I am so bad at playing it though. I have all the settings at their most liberal and I still do not have the high score. A very smart fella at one of my parties more than doubled my high score. I am now at about 1/2 his score at 2nd place. It is in great shape and I am so close to having it at %100 by my standards. It is like a bad relationship that keeps making me go back even though it makes me feel dirty. I want to get her perfect and never let her go :p
 
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Grbgemen said:
It's a hard game. Curious, what's the highscore on your machine?
Click to expand...

I have the settings as liberal as possible. So 5 guys and the ability to get an extra ball. The high score right now is 467,710 set by a guy who is really good at figuring stuff out. That was his 3rd game on the machine and had never played it before.

My high score is 260,000 or so. I have not played much pacman in my life, and this game does not play by the rules. Went and played a buddies Mrs. Pacman and was amazed how well I played.
 
If incandescent lamps are lighting there should be more than enough juice there to light an LED but I don't know the bias voltage of the LEDs you're using so that's just a guess.

If the incandescent lamps were really dim I would expect a connector problem (the ones you circled in red).

Have you tried the LEDs that are not working in a socket that is working just to be sure the LEDs work. Seems obvious but I'll check anyway :)

Can you tell me specifically which sockets are not working? Just because they don't appear related doesn't mean they are not.

This is making me want to pull out my Granny And The Gators! :)
 
I have two types of the ablaze LED lamps from pinball life. Frosted white and 3 LED white. I have moved bulbs around and used both kinds to verify that it is not just the bulb. I will check the ground (might be powered?) braids again just for the heck of it.

The connectors to the board had been replaced by the guy I bought it from. They look to be in good shape. It does not seem like it is a header pin issue since I was experiencing the same issue between the two boards.

I was going to grab a list of the sockets last night, but then freaked out over the blue screen, drop targets, and playing with the other board and forgot. Will grab a list tonight.

I would love to play a Granny and the Gators some day. I bet there are not many around.
 
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4882990530_192295df4b_b.jpg


It sure is nice to live 10 blocks from work and go home for lunch.

I marked the bulbs above in red that are not playing nice with the LEDs. A few of the arrows in the middle are not working, but I have not tried flipping the bulbs 180 there because they do not light during attract mode and the lamp test on the coin door does not seem to function properly.

BPM manual

Going to look through the manual and see if I can get more info.
 
tomdotcom said:
Alot of times with LED's you also need to bend the metal contacts out a bit and to the side, otherwise they won't light.
Click to expand...

Will try that when I get home. A few I could wiggle a bit to get to work. Others would not no matter what I tried. It is strange how the incandescent ones pop right in and the LED ones take some effort. I hope that is it, but would feel bad for wasting so much of your time.
 
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Very good chance that's the cause. EVERY single LED I install, I always bend the contacts first. We did my buddies fishtales, full conversion to LED, and probably half the bulbs didn't work. We had to flip some and readjust the contacts to get them to work. Crappy design, I like LED's and have a few in my pins, but there are a few things that are really annoying.

Some are to bright, some have ghosting, they turn off and on to fast makes the attract show ugly IMO.
 
>.<

Messed with a few sockets and multiple bulbs, no luck. Took a LED from a working socket and put it into one of the ones that is not working and nothing. Bent the contacts a bit and still nothing. Put back into the socket that worked and it was fine.

I noticed that the faint flicker I saw on an LED that was not working was because I was touching the ground braid and where the wire connects to the socket.

Blue tint is back on my monitor and it is jumpy and flickery :( Game still plays fine though.

It does seem that there is a bit of a pattern to the bulbs that are not working with LEDs. Looking at the shematics confused me a bit, but I will see if some are pairing up.
 
The blue monitor issue comes and goes. I have no clue.

LED issue. I switched lamp sockets between ones that worked and ones that did not, and the diodes on each. It is not the sockets. It is something that is tied to the location of the playfield lamp socket, because switching them made no difference.

Since I know the lamp board is not the issue, and not the lamp sockets, it has to be the MPU, wiring, or the vidiot.

I would like to have it all LED, but it works fine with normal bulbs. I am OK with going back to normal bulbs.

I will go through the pinrepair guides again to see what I can find.
 
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Well, at this point you should just sell the machine to me super cheap so I can have one , I have a BPM out here in Waverly, just no boards for it,,,, looking forward to getting mine resurected after reading this....sounds like you are on your way tho...
 
Howdy neighbor.

Cool. I bought it from troxel who still has one I believe. He mentioned he had a friend with one too. I have an extra lamp board if you can't find one.
 
Seems like we all have one. Kinda odd but very cool.

I checked my high score on mine and its at 260,000 with default settings. Fun but damn hard.
 
Hi, good reading for me...I have a baby pac as well...

My other pins have levelers on them to set the playfield.

Does baby pac have as well? What is best way to set up for easy or harder pinball play?

Thanks!
Chris
 
Sorry to dig this one back up.

quick recap
* some lights were out and it turned out that it was bad diodes and SCRs.
* Lindsey explained how bally was able to control 2 lamps individually on one SCR here
* With all the lights working I decided to put LEDs in this BPM. Some would not work. I even got some pricey non polarized and rectified ones, and still no luck.

So this post about diodes on a gottlieb caught my eye.

G-P-E said:
Use a switching diode -- 1N4148 or 1N914. Can find these at Rat-Shack.

Ed
Click to expand...

the BPM manual says to use 1N4148 on the lamp sockets. Some have 1N4001 diodes. When you say a switching diode a spark went off in my head and was wondering if this could be why the LEDs are not working.
 
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