WS2 crashes dispensing coins

[schnapdragron]

Hey,
I have a wash select 2 that crashes when it has to give change. If I unplug then replug the hopper cable to the main cup board it will work for a few days then go back to crashing. The harness is new
And all the set screws in the green block are good.

any ideas what it could be other than having to throw a spare cpu board in there?

cheers

 

[schnapdragron]

Turns out its not tied to change dispensing. it appears to crash now after triggering a wash relay

 

[Greg Pack]

That's likely a power supply issue. I very rarely had these problems before cryptopay, but seems like I am dealing with them more and more. But in all fairness these machines are over 20 years old. The easiest place to check voltage is on the six pin plug on the lower left of the I/O board. You should be able to measure all three pertinent voltages here- 5VDC, 24VAC, and 12VDC by measuring across the adjoining pins. . You need at least 4.5 VDC it seems for a cryptopay to work properly. If you measure low voltage (low 4s) there that is an easy diagnosis. If not you could still have corrosion/connection issues. since I believe the cryptopay power is fed by the ribbon cable from the main board. You can try cleaning those pins and checking for corrosion. I've got one unit that I have to occasionally bang on the shroud that has the power supply on the back of it because I'm too lazy to actually fix it the right way. I have a friend that simply re-stripped and re-landed all his wires on his power supply and his problems went away. Not fun because of the power supply location but can be accomplished in an hour or two on a quiet day.

An easy hack that may get your 5VDC voltage up enough to help is disconnect all your display LEDs. Takes five minutes and may get you out of a pinch, for a little while anyway.

Unitec was selling an updated power supply kit but since they are discontinuing the WSII I don't know if they are still available. RDM in North Carolina sells most everything you need to keep the WSIIs running.

 

[schnapdragron]

Thanks Greg. It was showing 5.1v and 12.08V on the multi meter. Once I removed the sound board / printer board (neither of which are useful to me) It seemed to stabilize. and I couldnt make it crash again. Probably time for an upgrade but gosh new pay stations are expensive!

 

[Greg Pack]

Sounds like the power supply voltage itself is good and hopefully you found the offending component. Keep an eye on it. I know in the past I’ve removed components I thought were bad and the crashing would stop for a while. But it would come back weeks later. When you first mentioned the change dispenser that was my first thought. I had to replace a hopper last year because it would crash when it attempted to dispense change. Checking and cleaning the pins on the display and cryptopay module and even replacing the ribbon cable might not be a bad idea, as well as checking the power plugs on the main board.

I’ve considered replacing these machines but just like my automatics I know them well enough that I’d rather deal with them and their quirks than going through a learning curve with a new machine that essentially will do the same job.