[PinSound 1] PinSound board reboots after working for a while.

Question

Twilight Zone.  The PinSound board will work for a short while ( a minute or two) then all sound stops and I hear the powering up beeps.  If I continue to play it does the same thing again.

Answer 1

It sounds like a weak +5V is powering the board.

Do you have a DMM to check your +5V on the PinSound board? If yes, you can check this value on the white extension connector (pin 1 & 4).

Comments

I'm having a similar problem. +5V off the white header was mostly around 4.7V but dipped to around 4.2 and up to 5.1 on occasions. One of the restarts I caught was at 4.2, but the other one was around 4.6V.

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You should investigate why your +5V is not stable.
It definitely shouldn't go under 4.90V.

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Might that be it then? It's weird that it runs ok for a while and when it resets it seems to be irrespective of voltage (I saw it reset at 4.2V and 4.7V, but of course not above since I only saw 5.1V briefly).

Weirdly, I couldn't find any correlation between the voltage and game-play. In fact the high voltage I saw was during play as opposed to idle. The flippers maybe cause a .1V drop maybe (it's a tad inconclusive).

I was pondering pulling out the WPC Power/Flipper board and replacing caps just to see, but I think I'd like to upgrade to the Rottendog (once the PinSound issue has been found with it) due to its use of DC-DC converters.

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Does your pin also reset without the PinSound board powered?

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Nope, just the PinSound board. When it starts to reset though, it resets often. It usually takes a good 5-15 minutes before it does though. One that happens it basically resets every few minutes. Pinball machine itself keeps on going. In fact I don't think I've had it reset on me once in the last 3 years I've owned it.

I was reading up on fixing up the WPC power board and was going to check voltages directly on it to see if perhaps the power connector to the PinSound needs to be redone. I might try that anyway since it can't hurt, although fixing it on the WPC power board means I should also replace the headers and that takes me down the road of having to remove the board and work on it (which starts to make the Rottendog compelling).

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by any chance, do you have another pinball machine compatible with PinSound to test this board?

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I wish :) The Mrs. shot that down pretty quick haha. I converted over to the stereo solution but I could convert back and test it with the original board. That's about the only alternative option I have currently available :/

I tried another test this morning (happy 2017!) with different results. This time I just left the machine in attract mode and check both the voltages on the driver board as well as PinSound. Both were close to 5V. After about 20 minutes or so, PinSound reset and then the speakers started making this whirrly beating/buzzing noise. Pressing the reset button on the microcontroller board (I believe that's some LPC variant?) fixed the buzzing although the board didn't fully reboot until I power-cycled the whole machine. After it did all that, I checked both voltages and they were both above 5V.

I power cycled the machine then checked a couple of test points which gave me the following:

TP1: 13.4
TP2: 5.06
TP3: 11.91
TP7: 22
Pinsound header: 4.99

The earlier issue notwithstanding, those voltages seem pretty good to me? Is it perhaps a case of dirty power? I have an analog oscope I could hook up, but am not entirely sure what conclusions I should be drawing based on what I would be looking at. If it was very dirty power though I should see my voltmeter moving around more? It looked pretty stable, at least in attract mode.

EDIT: I didn't mention it, but my problem is on an STTNG (not a TZ). Probably an important detail there :/