AMI Continental 2 Stepper

This is about the recreation of an AMI Continental 2 Stepper.

The stepper is part of some old jukeboxes. His job is to connect one or more wallboxes with the jukebox. A wallbox on the other hand is basically a remote control for the jukebox. She allows to chose music title from another location than the jukebox itself.

This was an arrangement which was used quite often at diner where the wallboxes were mounted at the tables where the customers sat. While the jukebox stood somewhere in the corner.

Technically it works that way that the chosen title is electromechanical translated into pulses and gaps between them of various number and length. The stepper receives these pulses, decode them and starts the same title selection again within the jukebox.

So far so good. What's the problem then?

The first problem is those steppers a very rare, hard to get and of course pretty expensive.
The second problem is for the AMI Continental 2 (build year: 1962) was never a stepper available.

Therefore when I got a AMI WQ200 wallbox I was forced to build my own stepper

to make it work together...

The AMI Continental 2 jukebox and the AMI WQ200 wallbox.

The stepper to connect the jukebox and the wallbox.

It's made of one Arduino MEGA controller board and two relay cards with 16 separate relays each.

Most of the relays represent the letters and numbers of the title selection as depicted on the jukebox.

So the Arduino MEGA board controls 32 relays, receives and decodes the signals from the wallbox and monitors a few states of the jukebox.

The wallbox.

The pulse signals are created by wiper contacts. This and the fact that the wallbox and therefore the contact surfaces are more than 50 years old results in a quite "dirty" signal quality.
To get rid of the many needle pulses I installed an additional relay and a capacitor. The new relay generates clean pulses now.

The Jukebox

The stepper is in parallel connected to the title selection switches of the jukebox.

So every switch got an additional wire to the stepper.

One sensor traces the state of the record magazine to register when no more records were chosen to play.

This made it possible to implement a random play function.

A few videos to show how it works.

Title selection alternating between wallbox and jukebox

Receiving the signals from the wallbox and triggering the selection in the jukebox.

The flashing light indicates the receiving impulses.

Receiving the signal from the wallbox and triggering the selection in the jukebox.