What we need to see now, is the serial output when the "pause" errors are actually happening. The fact that you only get the errors in the car is troubling, and I'm now suspicious that the wiring might not be feeding the Empeg enough juice to keep both drives properly spun-up.

Remember that if you're trying to use the serial connector in the car, the default baudrate is only 4800 (to make it more compatible with other third-party in-car serial applications). There is an entry you can add to CONFIG.INI on the player that will let you put the in-car baud rate back up to 115200, and I recommend you do this if you're going to diagnose problems on the serial port while in the car.


Well, I bet you thought I forgot about this


I wasn't able to use the seriel port connector on the sled because BestBuy cut the connections. So what I did was attach a cable to the connection on the back of the unit and powered it up. This worked for a little while but eventually, the unit just wouldn't recognize a command from terminal. Here is what I was able to log at boot-up:

---

empeg-car bootstrap v1.00 20000601 (hugo@empeg.com)
On DC power, quick boot

e000 v1.03
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux................................... done, booting the kernel.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg42 (mac@aphex.internal.empeg.com) (gcc versi
on 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #186 Tue Jun 5 20:07:53 BST 2001
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 7, serial number 90000784)
Command line: mem=12m temp=40 noinitrd
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 11008k/12M available (960k code, 20k reserved, 292k data, 8k init)
Dentry hash table entries: 2048 (order 2, 16k)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order 4, 64k)
Page cache hash table entries: 4096 (order 2, 16k)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 16384 bhash 16384)
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
Linux-IrDA: IrCOMM protocol ( revision:Tue May 18 03:11:39 1999 )
ircomm_tty: virtual tty driver for IrCOMM ( revision:Wed May 26 00:49:11 1999 )
Starting kswapd v 1.5
SA1100 serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0xf8010000 (irq = 15) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS01 at 0xf8050000 (irq = 17) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS02 at 0xf8030000 (irq = 16) is a SA1100 UART
Signature is 67706d65 'empg'
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004a80).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, 19077MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, 19077MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x3349
smc9194.c:v0.12 03/06/96 by Erik Stahlman (erik@vt.edu)

SMC9194: SMC91C94(r:9) at 0x4008000 IRQ:7 INTF:TP MEM:6144b MAC 00:02:d7:12:03:1
0
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1 < hdb5 hdb6 > hdb2 hdb3 hdb4
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 8k init
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To CompìøŽStart
ing player
empeg-car 1.03-beta4.
3b21fdea DHCP Our mac is 00:02:d7:12:03:10
3b21fdea DHCP Our address is 255.255.255.255
3b21fdea DHCP Broadcast address is 255.255.255.255
3b21fdea DHCP Current IP address is 255.255.255.255
3b21fdea DHCP Sending DHCP discover
Switching to

---

At that point all connections would not work at any baud rate. If I force the connection through, I would only get output at 115200 and not 4800 which is the norm for the docking sled connection. I am thinking the above won't tell us much and that I will have to re-connect the seriel port on the docing sled to be able to run a cntr-T and get the data we need. I was also not able to get any information when the unti slowed down and stopped because output would not display to terminal.

So I am thinking my next step is the soddering table?

The "switching to" at the bottom of the log indicates the unit is switching to 4800bps (obviously there was still data going out when it did the switch).

At that point, you will be able to quit the player (eg, with "q ") and/or see any error messages from the unit as long as you are at 4800 bps in your terminal program.

You *cannot* run Ctrl-T tests in the car, the wait-for-control-characters delay is skipped for a faster in-car boot. If you want to check your RAM you'll have to do it at home - but as your player is an 0900 unit, these all had thorough ram tests in the factory and so I suspect it's the 20GB disk problem we've seen (the drives need to be re-mounted on standoffs). You can contact support@empeg.com and we can do this for you.

Hugo

I have to say that it's service like this that makes me so happy to be a part of the 'empeg revolution'. any other company would just say "we know what the problem is but you'll have to return it to us for an indefinite period for us to fix it, and you've probably voided your warranty so it'll cost you."

service like this is invaluable.

Murray 06000047
I don't think, therefore I am not.

I bet it helps when you can talk to the person who made the thing

I wanted to say THANK YOU to Hugo, Dave, and Andrew for all your help on this. We had a very interesting back and forth with this unit involving replacing the bolts and then replacing the IDE cable inside but after several weeks, the unit is back up and running with no problems like I had before. They even replaced my sorely damaged docking sled and I installed the unit myself. The only remaning problems involve my AMP and grounding and those will be ironed out this weekend. Dave and Andrew were EXCELLENT in their service and really helped me along while I constantly bothered them with the fixing. THANK YOU for your hard work. I really appreciate it.

Greg

I have never seen any company with support as good as these guys i hope that sonicblue realise this and don't let the bean counters affect this when the Mk2 becomes huge.

If they didn't have the back up that they have i would of not bought the unit. i sent mine off to them for a hard drive upgrade due to me being a coward and it returned quickly and on a saturday as i was going away and a new knob and a replacement front moulding as the old one was damaged.

11/10 for product support