I spent some time tonight getting more familiar with all of the various circuits from the Doctor Who wiring schematics pages. Suffice it to say, the manual and its schematics are priceless when you have a machine completely un-wired 🙂 Then it was on to prepare the wiring harnesses for the flippers on AB1. Thankfully I can simply re-use the harnesses from Doctor Who, at least for the flippers!

During disassembly of Doctor Who, it became pretty clear that its wiring harness was  nicely separated into different bundles by function – one bundle for lights, another for switches and a third for solenoids. Since the flipper solenoids use dedicated wires, it was pretty trivial to separate them out to re-use as-is. The End-Of-Stroke switch wires however were a different story! Even though they are dedicated wires to the circuit and not part of the switch matrix, during manufacturing they were nevertheless bundled together with zip ties with the rest of the switch matrix wires. It was still relatively painless to separate them out – just some zip-ties to cut and then replace once the wires were separated out. Here’s a photo where I am about halfway done. The EOS wiring harness is on the left, and the big jumble of green wires on the right is for the switch matrix. I can already tell the Costco zip-tie mega pack is going to come in handy on this project 🙂

Finally, I spent some time re-connecting all the cabinet wiring to the boards in the backbox. Even with the Doctor Who playfield gone, there are plenty of things to hook up here: the flipper button and other cabinet switches, transformer power, DMD and Fliptronics boards, lights for the backbox and cabinet, etc.

Next time I should be ready to actually wire up the flippers and see if I can play a ball on my blank playfield!