Some buttons stop working randomly

Picade
1

I’ve built a Picade three weeks ago and, since the begining, I’m facing a strange problem.

From time to time, all the three lower buttons of the control pannel stop working at once for some seconds. When this happens, the Picade PCB does not light up when I press any of these buttons (the other buttons, including the utility ones, just work fine and make the PCB to light up). After some random pressing of buttons the problematic ones usually start working again (also, at once). This problem used to happen quite rarely but for the last three days, it happens more frequently (once an hour).

I’ve checked the connections of the PCB and also reflashed the PCB firmware with the latest one (tried the different versions available with or without headphone detection) with no luck. My PCB seems to be the latest one (blue circuit). I also changed the power supply (I do not get any lighting symbols), but nothing changed.

Any ideas on the cause of the problem or on things I may try to solve it?

Thanks!

2

I’m afraid I don’t have any idea off the top of my head, this is the first I’ve heard of a whole group of buttons working/not working. Are they all sharing the same ground wiring?

At a guess it sounds like you’ve got an intermittent electrical connection and the random pressing of buttons is just jolting it back into a working state.

3

Yes, they share the same ground. The strange thing is that the top three buttons also share the same ground and work fine. I’ll try to re-wire all the buttons from scratch and see what happens.

Thanks

4

Okay, keep me posted! And good luck.

5

I’m glad to confirm that it was an electrical problem. I rewired all the buttons and fastened the connectors and the buttons have been correctly working for the whole week (I waited to confirm that the problem was fixed).

Thanks!

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