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I know this is an old thread, but a few of us were discussing an issue this morning with Gottlieb chime units on the 8 Ball table. https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/eight-ball/
I mutes my system sound and just listened to the chimes and it was horrible. So now I’m on a quest to try to improve it.
@scottacus I hope you are still out there and can shed some light on your final findings…I’m running the chime unit a 24v today. I haven’t attempted the settings in this thread yet (just found it) and haven’t looked at the code for 8 Ball to see if there is a similar scoring timer…
Any updated info would be appreciated Thank you!!
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I just read your discussion
Was the charm unit design to work on 24v
The coils on mine run at 43vYou need to login in order to like this post: click here
I was part of this discussion. Think we are all currently running at 24V . Hopefully we will have a test soon with one of us using an upconverter to see if there is any improvement in strike-rate. Our current test-table is EIGHT BALL as a reference, which has distinct ‘musical tones’ at start of a game and quick burst sequences for the bonus tallies at the end of a turn (three quick bursts for each billiard ball scored).
My Gottlieb System 1 currently has there A-5195 coils in it. Scamps has A-17876 coils
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When you say it was horrible, what does that mean? Were the slugs not hitting the chime bars well? Was it missing notes?
@Outhere probably has the right solution if it was missing notes. Too low a drive voltage may prevent the slugs from driving hard enough to hit the chime bars.  By increasing the voltage you will increase the coil field magnetic strength which will make the slugs move faster (at least on the way up since gravity takes care of returning them to the start position).Another solution that I think I may have messed around with is raising the slugs up so they don’t have as far to travel. You could test this by putting a small shim under the slug to raise it up from the rubber stopper that it rests on in the down position. Shorter travel should make the unit cycle faster.
One thing to remember is that chime units that we might buy on e-bay likely come from old AC EM machines. Eight ball is a solid state machine so I’m going to guess that it uses DC to power its coils. Typically AC coils have lower resistance because the actual voltage to produce the magnetic field is the RMS or about 70% of the rated AC voltage. Since V=IR, lower voltage requires lower resistance to generate the same current flow. Hooking these lower resistance AC coils to DC (like in our virtual cabs) will actually increase the current to higher levels if you use the same voltage in DC as the machine was designed for in AC (ex 24v AC is about 70% of 24v DC) so you will get a stronger magnetic field in the coil with 24v DC than you will with 24v AC. More voltage = more current = stronger magnetic field = faster motion = more heat generated.
Hope this helps!
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Whoa.. @Scottacus… you live!!! Haha.. tried pinging you a while back; I had used your blueprint (and Rusty’s input) to do a Kodi Jukebox. Not sure if you ever saw the final result… got LEDBlinky rockin’ out with it too
Anyways, yes we are on the path of finding a nice voltage to ‘up-to’. This is currently an ‘active discussion’ on the Discord. With that, pending some testing, we are also of the mind to set the Global DOF Config to 20ms as our starting point, and, do some code-hunting in the tablescripts for any timing that may be ‘out-of-range’ and try to ‘tune them’ to something like 150ms.
Thanks for ‘chiming-in’ :P
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Whoa.. @Scottacus… you live!!! Haha.. tried pinging you a while back; I had used your blueprint (and Rusty’s input) to do a Kodi Jukebox. Not sure if you ever saw the final result… got LEDBlinky rockin’ out with it too
Anyways, yes we are on the path of finding a nice voltage to ‘up-to’. This is currently an ‘active discussion’ on the Discord. With that, pending some testing, we are also of the mind to set the Global DOF Config to 20ms as our starting point, and, do some code-hunting in the tablescripts for any timing that may be ‘out-of-range’ and try to ‘tune them’ to something like 150ms.
Thanks for ‘chiming-in’ :PI use 60ms on the Global DOF Config website with this coil AE-26-1200 ( 43v DC ) From Pinballlife.com
https://www.pinballlife.com/storefront.htmlYou need to login in order to like this post: click here
@Outhere The Gottlieb chime units (from what I read) might run in the real cabs at 28v for the coils…As Dondi pointed out we are running at 24v
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Thanks for all the replies on this! @Dondi and I are working on this with another peer…
My comment on how horrible it was is best described in a video. I muted my machine so it is clear to hear what I meant.
The other thing I’m considering is does the used Gottlieb Chime unit I am using have the proper plungers in it? I see some replacements which have a plastic tip yet mine were simply solid bars…The plastic tip might raise them a bit more, meaning less travel…Still researching this though! Since these things are all used, I guess its possible someone could have put the wrong parts in them wrecking performance…
Chime test 8 Ball video:
https://mega.nz/file/a0swXYoa#zdrFTJDNe-aEZnD7RbbREz9eNZAtofjnYVDbZjNVhEI
Ia added a photo of my unit too
Thanks again!
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Yes, news of my death has been exaggerated (Twain). I’ve been rather busy here so not a lot of vp work in the last half year
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cuphead-home-brew-pinball
One of the chime bars sounds weak to me while another sounds fine. Voltage is probably your issue or too short a pulse wave in DOF. The plastic tips are there to protect the bottom of the chime bars. Since the chime bars are aluminum and the slugs are steel, slugs without plastic tips will chew a circle into the bottom of the chime bar. I’ve seen this firsthand on one of my EM flips.
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There should definitely be a nylon tip on the plungers in the Gottlieb units. if your’s have broken off then the plungers would be too short to strike effectively, or if the right length plunger but all metal it would not pull up as high and again not strike effectively. the magnet essentially wants to center the metal part of the plunger
the A-17876 would be right coil for DC driven SS chime units using 24V, the A-5195 are stronger and tend to get more of a clunk then a nice chime when driven with 24vdc.
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Gottlieb system 1 machines run at 24vdc for the coils, not 28vdc.
The other thing that can be in play is the rate at which they fire can be too much for the switching power supplies to keep up with, having a big capacitor in the mix helps with that. I didn’t read through everything to see if you already have something like that.
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No caps today, except what is likely part of the relay boards….
A cap is interesting to build up the energy correct? While I mess around with electronics, I wouldn’t even be able to guess as to the size of the cap needed for each coil…
I need nylon tips then? I gotta figure out the right part to get new rods then
Thanks @BorgDog
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@scottacus I agree, I think one of my coils isn’t firing correctly. I may replace that one…
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Before you go buying a new coil just unhook it from the system and check it’s resistance with a multimeter. If the resistance reads the same as on a chart of coils (or the same as the other coils next to it in the unit) then the coil is not your problem.
@Borgdog is absolutely right about checking the power demands for your system. Current = Voltage/Resistance so if you know the resistance of your coil and the voltage running it you can calculate how much current it will draw at steady state.Adding in a cap is like putting a battery into the circuit.  In terms of size for the cap, bigger is better.  Just be aware that a charged 10,000 uF cap can give you quite a jolt if you happen to discharge it by touching it! I would think that you would just have one cap across the positive/gnd on your power supply and it would work for the entire system. Borgdog, correct me if this is wrong.
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I think that would work, but I’m not an expert. I put in a power filter input board for OPP in mine because I had one, but I think that’s basically what it does.
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Thank you @scottacus and @borgdog !!
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I looked up my coil and its resistance is 24ohms….I’m running at 24volts….
So Current=24/24
Current=1amp
3 coils, so 3amps just for the chime unit, not including anything else on that power supply at the time (Siemens contactors)…in this case, the contactors aren’t even firing at the moment, its just the chimes I believe.
I’m running a Meanwell 12v power supply with 29amps, so I think the power is good!
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@scottacus I read another post of yours called Chime Wars where you linked to a test table you were using to test the speed of the chimes. Â The link was broken in the post.
would you happen to still have the table, and would you be willing to share it?
Also, Did you manage to ultimately get your Gottlieb chimes running well?  Have you run the Eight Ball table and had good results?  I don’t think we asked you this previously…
thank you!!
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That table was on my google drive account and in the intervening three years it has been deleted. I’ll take a look around my cab’s computer and see if I still have it somewhere. If I remember right all it was, was a table with timers of various intervals that you could call by hitting keys on the keyboard to activate them. This would send pulses of various lengths to the chimes to see how fast you could drive them before there were missing hits.
Not sure about 8-ball, I’ll have to check that on the cab. If I remember right, there were some tables that I couldn’t get a chime unit to fire fast enough on and there were others like Evil Kineval (sp?) that had four bar chime units that I couldn’t play with my standard 3 bar chime unit.
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I can’t find the old chime test table but it was just timers set at different intervals that activated upon keystrokes so it would be pretty easy to reproduce. I didn’t have this Eight Ball table on my cab so I loaded it and my chime unit cannot play all of the notes. It misses the last few where the same chime is cycled a few times in a row. I also noticed that the script calls for four different chime tones so if that is true my 3 chime unit could never play it anyway. I think that @randr might have a four chime unit in his cab?
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