- May 30th, 2019, 12:36 pm#4918563In all fairness, the Proton Pack and Trap weren't much better in terms of quality, but the Proton Pack in particular was less likely to fail just due to how the LEDs were mounted right on to the circuit board in the cyclotron. Everything else, though, was a bit of a mess. The throwers on the packs would often have issues with LEDs and breaking, and don't even get me started on the traps. I purchased a couple and both have had issues of some sort or another, and those were the two good ones from more than a dozen I handled in person at stores. One of the most common questions I've gotten on my youtube videos about my work on the Spirit Halloween traps is what to do when the lights and/or sounds stop working or the question of what to do when the doors stop opening or closing properly. So the PKE Meter wasn't really an anomaly, all the props Spirit Halloween put out were pretty lacking in the quality area.
If you do open up your PKE Meter, it might be worth it to invest in an anti-static wrist band and have some anti-static bags ready to put the components down on as you open things up. With the trap that people were modding, I had several people report that their traps would just stop working after opening and, after helping them troubleshoot and determine it wasn't a wiring issue, it almost always seemed that the most likely culprit was static discharge ruining some aspect of the integrated circuitry that drove the lights and sound. So, if you do open up to troubleshoot, take it slow, take the correct precautions, and yeah, it's often just a loose wire or some silly thing like that.