A ghost is touching my monitor!

[4 Deuces]

IGT GK 3902, I turn JP key until ready to perform calibration, then, when I get to touch screen test, it starts registering a touch in the same place.  It's sort of diagonal line from bottom-left to upper-right about 3 inches in the upper-right portion of the screen.  If I jiggle the machine a bit, it does it even more.

It's a ghost, isn't it?  I just know it's someone who passed away and loves GK's!

Besides a ghost, anything else?

:Dave

[4 Deuces]

I should add this is not a new problem.  I just picked up the machine and was resetting it when I realized the TS was acting up, so I stopped with the keychip and have been trying to get it calibrated ever since.

[4 Deuces]

One more admission I used aluminum duct tape (the kind that's used on heating/cooling ducts) around the edge of the monitor's touch screen.  Could that be the cause?  Is that causing a grounding issue?

[cowboygames]

Could be you're grounding it with that tape

[Buzz]

Rob  On this grounding of the touch screen on a IGT machine to prove a point just to myself I did this little experiment.  I used a real long screw driver, I made sure I only touched the handle, held the shank of the screw driver againest the door frame and placed the end to a touch  tab on the screen. You know what happened, nothing !!!  OK that proved one thing to me so then making sure  nothing was touching the machine, I placed one finger on the shank of the screw driver and placed the end of the screw driver to the same tab, this time the touch screen worked. I might add I have a rubber mat that runs the length of my room to keep the slot chairs from scratching the tile floor, I was standing on that mat and not touching the machine.

Second experiment, took a piece of electrical wire, bared both ends, stuck one end into the wall ground plug for the machine, plug the power cord back into the same wall plug touched the other end of the wire to a touch pad, you want to know what happened, NOTHING. Again I touch the bare wire with my finger and it worked.

The only conclusion you can arrive at is grounding the touch screen does nothing. Our expert is more than welcome to come into this thread, type in caps and tell all how he has been doing this for 15 to 20 years and the only thing he can prove is he knows next to nothing about touch screens and how they work !!!!!!!!!!.

[cowboygames]

So maybe something applying pressure to that point on the screen like maybe the screen isn't pushed in all the way or something along those lines?

[kforeman]

   i've seen pressure from the bezel affect the functionality of touch screens in the past; i've also had to deal with a non-oem touch screen having a slightly different physical size cause a pressure related problem. with this particular issue for 4 Deuces i would first suspect a bad controller and would swap with another known good machine.  i've also witnessed that sometimes a person grounding their off hand on the player panel did help their particular touch effectiveness on that touch screen.  i've also seen machines with touch screen issues get better after a belly light ballast was properly grounded.  i've also seen shit tons of touch screen issues come and go because of a bad printer or BV...i've been teching with 400+ IGT machines on my floor for 11 years (just for you Buzz)    and can confirm from personal experience that there can be all kinds of reasons for touch screen issues; especially the funky ones like this dude's. usually it's something pretty simple, hopefully he can isolate it to a specific cause so we can all learn!  


edit:  shit Buzz i just reread your post and realized i forgot to use all CAPS!!!!  sorry man, i'll try to do better next time.    btw, i actually have been to a 3M training class on gaming touch screens but couldn't tell you the first thing from it cause it had no practical fucking information!!  i was a wee 1.25 year tech and had no damn idea what the waves on an o-scope meant; much less what the hell to do about it if they were the wrong kinda wavy!!!  looking back it would be kinda nice to be able to truly explain some of the wacky shit slot machines do...nah, who am i kiddin; cheap and dirty tech all the way baby.  make the damn machine take money and that's all that matters!! 

p.s.   hey 4 Deuces, i would suggest getting rid of the aluminum tape around the touch screen.  never used it so don't know for sure but we all know the touch screens use electical signals to function; common sense tells me that grounding the screen edges where the wires or traces reside is probably not a good idea.  a couple layers of electrical tape would be better if you don't have the foam or fabric type tapes.

[4 Deuces]

Wells, for sh!ts and giggles, I removed the aluminum tape and replaced it with electrical tape, put it all back together and the MF calibrated perfectly.  Sorry Buzz! 

Looks like Cowboy Games was right.

Or maybe the ghost moved on.

Anyway, THANK YOU ALL for your feedback.

[4 Deuces]

By the way, I did have the monitor screwed in too tight and that was even worse, so loosening it definitely made it better.