Talk about the your favorite Ghostbusters Collectibles from Mattel, Kenner, and more.
#355450
So when Matty put out the PKE last year I did a teardown and comparison (here: http://www.gbfans.com/community/viewtop ... 90&t=23527). Since I'm one of the lucky ones who got a trap with doors that don't work I figured I'd do it again with the trap and hopefully figure out what's wrong along the way.

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Since I'm making this a full teardown I started with the Pedal. The bottom comes off easy enough:
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The pedal switch is a side-mounted momentary which should keep it from breaking through overenthusiastic play (the switch at least, the pedal will still probably break eventually)
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The connector, as people have pointed out, is just a mini-jack plug:
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All of the detail peices come off easily with screws which means substituting in real parts shouldn't be overly difficult:
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I poked at the cable briefly but the connectors are glued together and I'm not ready to completely screw up my investmen....I mean my adult collectable. :wink:

The trap body comes apart easily:
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The internal connector comes out with 2 screws, then there's a screw underneath it for the further electronics:
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The toggle switch... isn't. It's a pot-metal piece that transfers the motion to a slide switch. It'd be relatively easy to grind out the mounting points and replace it with an accurate switch.
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The cartridge is another story:
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The forward indicator is connected by a ribbon cable and the switch is mechanically attached to a regular slide switch:
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The "screen" is painted white on the back with surface mount LEDS around it. I couldn't capture the blue "electricity" lights as they're too fast:
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Underneath that is the brains of the trap. It's labeled Rev2 so they obviously went through a few design changes. There's two empty spots for capacitors they didn't bother to take out.
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The rear motor is the shaker motor that jiggles the wheels. It's just a simple mechanical offset:
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The door motor is also a fairly straight forward mechanical setup with a rotating cam that moves the pegs up and down.
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After putting everything back together my doors worked a little better but still didn't open very far. I'm gonna have to take it apart again and figure out how to power it up so I can watch the movement. Something has to either be binding or catching somewhere. Also, the two momentary switches on either side of the door motor assembly that keep track of "open" and "closed" may have something to do with it. There's really nothing mechanically wrong with the setup so it's gotta be something stupid like a loose screw or badly positioned switch. I did notice when putting the cartridge back together that you have to be careful how you position the ribbon cable for the forward indicator or else the cartridge release won't work correctly.

That's it for now, I'll putz with it some more and see what I can figure out.
#355461
TAPS_Family_Anthony wrote:how sturdy is the connection between the hose and trap? could you hold it by the hose for instance with the trap attached?
It's pretty tight. I was able to hold it but I wouldn't carry it far that way. You could do a pose but don't go swinging it around for a parade.
#355472
TAPS_Family_Anthony wrote:I wonder if there would be a way to make it more secure.
If you never wanted to remove it you could epoxy that sucker in.

Or for a semi-permanent install plug in it and then internally drive a screw or two through the plastics securing it in place.
#355480
Well I got my doors working. Wasn't really anything special, just poked around at the catches a bit to make sure they were in the clear and and put in brand new fresh batteries. I get the grinding sound when it opens and closes but the doors open more or less fully.

The problem as I see it is the door mech isn't solidly railed. When the cam pushes it up it tends to rotate around the cam which causes one side to push up more than the other. Combined with the weight of the door springs and the low mechanical advantage of the point that's being pushed on it just doesn't have the power to open the doors. If they'd put better guide runners on the part it would eliminate most of the issue. An internal lever off the cam would be even better as it'd give you better mechanical advantage and still be functional at low power. They would have had to make the door motor part of the upper half though, the engineering involved would be a pain.

Best I can say to people with the same problem is, hold the doors open manually and then hit the pedal. If the door slides come up all the way it's your batteries. If the slides don't come out all the way or come out cockeyed either your cam is misgeared or the cables are in the way. If nothing happens at all a wire's probably broken off and the motor isn't getting power.
#355482
Kingpin wrote:Any notes on the side panels and their assembly? It looks like it could be possible to remove the plastic knobs and substitute real ones (although you'd need a new cosmetic plate to position the Raytheon correctly).
The side panels are glued in, no fasteners that I can find. I think the knobs are press-fit. You'd have to really wrench on them to pop them off and there's no guarentee that the spindle would be usable afterwards.
#355654
Thanks for the brave teardown! I read elsewhere that using weak batteries can cause the door opening issue, and using fresh ones cured his problems.

I wonder if high charge rechargables would be better then standard batteries?
#355656
Gareee wrote:Thanks for the brave teardown! I read elsewhere that using weak batteries can cause the door opening issue, and using fresh ones cured his problems.

I wonder if high charge rechargables would be better then standard batteries?
I had brand-new batteries in mine, but I may swap 'em tonight just for $hit$ & giggles. I'm tempted to grab a 6v AC/DC wall-wart and see how the thing operates on that if all these problems could be from power issues.
#355669
nolatron wrote:I had brand-new batteries in mine, but I may swap 'em tonight just for $hit$ & giggles. I'm tempted to grab a 6v AC/DC wall-wart and see how the thing operates on that if all these problems could be from power issues.
Venkman71 said he had loose wire connections in his. As I said, I think power issues is just one of the problems people are having. The design of the door mechanism is poor, the gearing can be out of sink and the cables can get in the way. People will have to troubleshoot their own issues individually. :whatever:
#355677
jackdoud wrote:People will have to troubleshoot their own issues individually. :whatever:
Yeah, Pretty much.

Last night after putting my trap back together, my doors wouldn't open anymore. They move a tiny bit and the gear starts slipping.

Gonna dissect it again tonight anyway as I wanna try some stuff in the pedal to see why it's triggering stuff on its' own.

Still waiting to hear back from Matty on a replacement too.
#355849
Jack,

I didn't try last night but did you try to get into the front bar graph area?

I wonder if a small piece of yellow acrylic/plastic could be put in there to cover the "LEDs on a circuit board" look. Something to make it look more like a bar graph.
By Nate
#356140
jackdoud wrote:Well I got my doors working. Wasn't really anything special, just poked around at the catches a bit to make sure they were in the clear and and put in brand new fresh batteries.
I've got brand new batteries, but the left door opens 98% of the way, so it's not really an issue—maybe it's even normal—but my OCD might get the better of me. Anybody else notice the doors not open all the way?
#356183
I gotta say I'm really impressed with the trap. It's way better than the PKE was. If I ever do a trap circuit I'm gonna have to mimic the shaking with the ghost trying to escape, and the multicolored lights add a lot as well.

On another note,

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I wonder what the black stuff on the circuit board is for?
#356205
joeghostbuster wrote:so with all these problems, what if you bought your (unopened) trap from ebay? are you still able to contact matty about a replacement / repairs or is the seller responsible?
I have a friend who works at a catalog call center. This issue comes up a lot with people ordering items from ebay and the seller orders the items (on the buyer's behalf) from a catalog and ships to the buyer. If there is a problem with the item, the catalog supplier can't help the buyer directly. The buyer would have to contact the ebay seller to process the refund / replacement (again on the buyer's behalf).
#356211
Hm, seems when you said proprietary chip you didn't mean a specific model of microcontroller they didn't want us to know about:
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 142AAYklMY
As someone else answered, this is Chip On a Board (COB) construction. It is a bare chip glued to the circuit board and then connected to pads on the board and pads on the chip with very fine and delicate wires. This procedure eliminates an expensive packaging process that would otherwise be required if the chip were mounted on a lead frame first, bonding wires added between the leads on the frame and the pads on the chip, and then the whole thing encased in some sort of injection molded plastic package. By-passing all that, just add a drop of magic goop and Voila! No reverse engineering allowed. No expensive packaging required. No repairs possible. Intellectual property protected. Market share preserved. What’s not to like?

The chemistry used to make the dollop of goop was expressly designed to thwart any attempts to remove JUST the goop and leave the rest. All of the methods I have seen in other answers are extremely dangerous outside of a laboratory environment. At the very least you want a fume hood, protective clothing, a self-contained breathing apparatus, awareness of the hazardous properties of chemicals used, and training in the safe use of those chemicals. This is not typically something the average hormone-driven 15-year old gives much thought. I know because I been there, done that, and burned acid holes in the tee-shirt.

Still, this seems ridiculous. First off, how expensive must it be to have a custom IC made? Second, why bother when an off the shelf microcontroller would do the job, and they're really cheap? Third, anyone who would want to remove the goop to steal the chip design must surely be able to fabricate said chips, and would likely have their own team of engineers perfectly capable of doing so, and they would surely have access to a fume hood and the necessary chemicals to do the job.

I guess it's possible this method is somewhat cheaper and making the chip hard to get at is just a side bonus, but can it really be cheaper to have a custom chip made?
#356233
GhostGuy wrote:Seems kinda silly to go to all the trouble... I mean microcontrollers are hardly a secret.
You're completely missing the point. They're not trying to hide anything, it's all how cheap they can make it. When they say "chip on board" they don't meen an IC chip like a 555 stuck to the board and then globbed over. They mean the chip circuitry itself was built directly into the board. The "black glob" is the same stuff the body of an IC is made from (more or less) just globbed on since all the leads are already permanently routed where they need to go. It's a cover for the circuitry, not some attempt at hiding the components. There's no reason to use a general purpose microcontroller, it'd be way more than is necessary, take longer to program and be larger than needed.
#356244
jackdoud wrote:There's no reason to use a general purpose microcontroller, it'd be way more than is necessary, take longer to program and be larger than needed.
Sure there is. It can't be easy or cheap to make a custom silicon wafer. But I guess if Matty sold thousands of these, they might have saved money even though the initial setup cost must surely be astronomical.

Also, I can't see how it could be easier to design a custom chip with a bunch of transistors than it is to program a microcontroller. I could bang out the code for a trap like this in a day, assuming they have another chip on board which handles the sound playback. It's just a matter of triggering the right pins at the right times then, much like what I did with Ecto's trap circuit.

But designing your own chip to do the same? I guess if you have designed it before it might take about the same amount of time.

And be larger than needed? You've seen the size of the chip on the pro mini. That's just as small as what they have there, and it's probably not even the smallest micrcontroller Atmel has available.
#356249
GhostGuy wrote:But designing your own chip to do the same? I guess if you have designed it before it might take about the same amount of time.
Every electronic device since the early 90's has use custom "blob" controllers. Now a days general microcontrollers are starting to get cheap enough that they could be used but the infrastructure for custom fabrication has been in place and established in the manufacturing sector for decades. It's only expensive if you're not doing a run of a few thousand or more.
GhostGuy wrote: And be larger than needed? You've seen the size of the chip on the pro mini. That's just as small as what they have there, and it's probably not even the smallest micrcontroller Atmel has available.
The circuitry under the blob is probably under a square milimeter in area.
#356309
This might not be on the exact train of discussion in here, but I figure with many electronically knowledgeable folks it might be a good place to ask. How hard might it be to replace the current cord with a longer one? I think 6-7 ft is a bit stingy and noticeably short.

It doesn't seem like it would be very difficult, just to remove the black cover and splice in some more wire to your heart's content, but I don't know much about this kinda stuff and am certainly not going to go crazy cutting into my $130 toy without some asking around.

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