I Dream In Infrared...

 F**king finally - opto's are online! 

Pardon the french, but I've been troubleshooting the optos for 6+ months without success, and yesterday the solution came to me lying half-awake in bed... It's stupidly simple, has a few downsides - but it works. 

After a few months of this...

1) Breadboard horror...

I realized (but not sure why) there was no power reaching the +3.3V line that powers the opto's. Come to think of it, pretty much all +3.3V devices are powered by the Chipkit already... hmm hmm. 

Turns out it was easier to create a new circuit on a breadboard and use a regular remote to trigger the IR receiver. This allowed me to see exactly what worked, and I could then apply the same method of troubleshooting on the board itself. 

2) Dusty horror....

Anyhow - I suspect a grounding issue (remember way back when I had problems with the +5V line not functioning correctly, or rather some of the MCP23S17 IC's would not work) so I simply took the same approach here. Basically, allowing the Chipkit to force the current the right way, since I suspect they're better at designing PCB's than I... 

And sure enough - we got opto's. 

3-4) Opto off and on. Tried and tested in the VUK, so it works
properly with a ball too and not just some giant hand covering it up.

Bloody brilliant! 

Pretty happy that I didn't had to make any (more) changes to the PCB and/or create external circuitry. This was also the last remaining hardware that needed to be solved, so onwards to creating the actual game!

Still here? 

What do you mean 'downsides'?

Well, yes. 

This change has pretty much rendered the fuses on the +3.3V and +5V lines completely useless as power will be drawn from the Chipkit (also) regardless. I have moved the screen to it's own power line now though, so worst comes to worst - only a few MCP's will burn to a crisp in case of failure. 

I hope. 

Operation Mother

So - finally got my greasy fingers around properly installing the motherboard inside the machine.

Still haven't got my opto's to work but at this moment I'll have to live without them. Will need to debug the circuit and possibly rebuild it separately in the future. 

Like most of the work on this build it's a bit of "one step forward, two steps back" since I was only going to screw the board to the backing plate. But... I forgot that the backing plate was made out of cheap fiber board so screws won't work - and - of course the cables didn't reach the intended position for the board.

So I did what any hobby engineer with(out?) self respect would have done; I cut a big hole inside the frame of the head.

This worked alright, but due to the placement of the intended cut everything turned out a bit crooked. Not that it matters much, since now it's done. But I know my future self will grin at this during any maintenance session, haha...

"Fun fact" - while checking out the playfield, it turns out most of the rubbers have cracked and need replacements. Again. But I guess I kind of was prepared for that and it'll have to wait until the game logic / game rules are completed and the machine is closed up properly.

Other than a few mishaps; the board is now installed and I didn't break anything in the process!

Installed and ready to be developed!

P.S, ignore the double vision display, there's
a small gap between the display and the panel at the moment.