IR LED Receiver help

uriahsky

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I need to replace an IR LED receiver in a redemption game. This is a Five Star Raptor Captor and it is one of the ball scoring hoops. I am not sure how to find something that works. They want $$$ for any part on these games. I have a bunch of IR LED receivers but none of them seem to work and the only thing I found as a difference is the resistance on the ones I have don't go low enough. If I hook up a five star IR receiver to my fluke meter and in the resistance mode when a transmitter is shined onto the receiver the ohms drop down to 1K. With no IR light on them it is up to 50K. All of mine are in the mega-ohms and don't get down to 1K. Is there a spec on a data sheet that reflects this situation? Or am I doing something wrong here. I can't change the electronics in the game, I have to match a sensor to the game. Am I missing the obvious on this one??

Thanks
Russ
 
I don't know anything about that game specifically, but you might just have the wrong type of receiver. There are photodiodes and phototransistors, which both look similar, but behave differently. Generally, measuring the resistance of one of them isn't the proper way to check specs though. There is such thing as a photoresistor, which does change resistance with light... but they look totally different. And there are IR receivers, meant for receiving modulated signals from an IR remote control... which again is likely not what you want.

Do you have a pic of the sensors and where they go in the game? And a pic of what you've got?

DogP
 
I will do some research on phototransistors but I am 99% sure I am dealing with photo diodes because I deal with these things all of the time in redemption games. I have purchased many of them through ebay and other places but it always seems it is a crap shoot trying to find ones that match up. They are always generally used as an off/on type of thing where the emitter is blocked by something and the receiver changes voltage by I assume changing resistance because of the lack of IR light from the emitter.
I may be wrong but I assumed it was the resistance range I need to match. You can change the resistors used in the circuit to get different results but I can't really do this on this or many games.
Thanks for the feedback
Russ
 
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