What do you mean by "seemed to really slow things down"? At the most it should be about 7us difference - there should be no noticable effect.

I suspect it may be a combination of shorter initial delay plus playing with the bit timings. I've no idea how much the frequency varies on a ceramic oscillator with temperature, but it's not going to be more than maybe 5-10% (which shouldn't make a difference, really).

Hugo

There is a 4th problem that I see:

Player boots, display is fine, player program starts, dimmer drops low and becomes erratic when adjusted with either the knob or buttons. Usually occurs when I have my headlights on (may be due to it trying to change, I'll set the daytime to 90% and see what happens). Seems to have started with either 2.0 or the colder part of the year. Has happened on both a MK2 and MK2a.

Maybe I'm not explaining this properly.

There are about 10 of us on here that I can see that are having a common problem.

When I first turn my player on and the Unit is in the range of 5 Deg C to about 24 Deg C, the dimmer function does not work correctly when it is adjusted. It doesn't matter if you use the buttons OR the volume knob. If your dimmer is set at say 50% and the brightness looks like 50% and you turn the brightness to 60% the dimmer may "look like its at 0% or 70 or whatever". Then say if you turn it to 70% it may look like its at 100%, when you turn it to 80% it may look like its at 80 percent, then when you turn it to 90, it may look like its at 0%. Then when you turn it to 100% it may "look like its at 100% or look like its at 50% or whatever. My point is, and I'm not using the volume knob to adjust it, if you turn the dimmer up higher, the brightness of the display may acutally go DOWN OR UP. The dimmer doesnt adjust properly until the unit is over 26 Degrees. Would it help if I made a video of this and mailed it to somebody. This is really frustrating the hell out of me. I can show you on video tape what is happening at what temperatures.

By the way. When the temperature is at 4-24 degrees, and the dimmer is set to 100% and you keep pressing the "right arrow button, the dimmer will vary in brightness (looks like it changes from about 50% brightness to about 110% brightness) EVEN though it keeps saying 100%
When the temp is 24-35 degrees, and the dimmer is set to 100 percent and you keep pressing the right arrow button, the dimmer stays at 100 percent brightness and does not change. It is rock steady.....

why are you even trying to turn it past 100%???
that doesn't even make sense, you want the to put extra lines of code to protect you from yourself?
"maybe it's a problem with the interface between the keyboard and the chair"

Guardian, please don't comment like that if you haven’t seen the problem. I also have this problem with 2 units. I am performing testing now, and it does seem temperature related. I will post more when I have repeated the experiment.

A friend’s player has never shown the problem, suggesting a hardware issue with some players.

In reply to:

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If your dimmer is set at say 50% and the brightness looks like 50% and you turn the brightness to 60% the dimmer may "look like its at 0% or 70 or whatever". Then say if you turn it to 70% it may look like its at 100%, when you turn it to 80% it may look like its at 80 percent, then when you turn it to 90, it may look like its at 0%. Then when you turn it to 100% it may "look like its at 100% or look like its at 50% or whatever. My point is, and I'm not using the volume knob to adjust it, if you turn the dimmer up higher, the brightness of the display may acutally go DOWN OR UP. If the dimmer is set to 100% and you keep pressing the "right arrow button, the dimmer will vary in brightness (looks like it changes from about 50% brightness to about 110% brightness) EVEN though it keeps saying 100%

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Yes, mine does the exact same thing whether I'm using the buttons or the rotary controller, but mine does it regardless of temperature. I'm sending my Empeg in to have it checked out.

Same here. I posted a while ago about it but noone said anything.

-Greg

"- Player thinking lights are on/off randomly and setting dimmer to suit. This is probably over-sensitive detection of the glitches on the headlight sense line and we can probably do something about it in the player. Can people suffering from this please describe their setups? "

I have never used mine in the car or used hijack to adjust the dimmer, but sometimes the boot-up is dim, sometimes bright. Sometimes it plays dim, sometimes it plays bright. I have never seen it change brightness without a reboot (except for when going from boot-up to playing). I have only seen it change after being rebooted. Remember that bug in beta 7 where the player would reboot itself when switched to the seek tool? Everytime that I can remember that that happened to me (which was quite often), the player would come up dim after the reboot. It was an expected and consistent thing. Perhaps you may be able to gather a few clues from that.

*Don't* use the rotary control when in the dimmer menu.

Thanks, Hugo, I'm putting this in the FAQ now.

guardian__J, not that I feel the need to explain myself to you, but I will because what you posted irritated the hell out of me. The reason is because when the problem occurs, selecting 100% again gets it to resample itself and I am trying to show that when it resamples at 100% when its cold, the VFD displays random brightness levels. When you resample the VFD at 100% when its warm, the VFD stays at a constant brightness.

Why am I even bothering with this. I have people posting stupid comments about the tests I am doing. What the hell. If you don't have the problem, dont crituque what I am trying to do. Are you helping in any way by saying what I am doing is stupid and doesn't make any sense?

Damn dude, you really have me all pissed off!

Player boots, display is fine, player program starts, dimmer drops low and becomes erratic when adjusted with either the knob or buttons- From Drakino.

This is all due to the same problem. When you boot your player and senses that your headlights are on, it is going to dim the player to whatever you have your dimmer set to. Say 70%. When the player is COLD and it tries to set it to "70%", it will randomly select a brightness level. If your player is WARMED UP, it will actually set it to 70 percent. You will notice that if you have the problem when your car is cold, sometimes it may even dim the display to the point where you cannot even see it. If you wait till the player warms up to over 24 deg C or so, you will notice this problem goes away. You could wait till the player warms up and turn your headlights off, then back on. You will notice that the dimmer will now function to whatever you have it set to....

If you could, next time you turn your headlights on and notice that your player dims to the wrong brightness level (assuming your car and player are cold), leave your heat on full blast to get the player warmed up (in my truck it takes about 20 minutes). Then turn your headlights off and on, see if your dimmer is actually what you set it to, then try adjusting it. I bet that when you try adjusting it after the player is warm, the dimmer will no longer be erratic...

Let me join you! My Mk2a shows excactly the same "random" behavior... I haven't checked if it's temperature dependent yet.

Welcome to the Experiment!

There is no such thing as random!

Then you have never lost big in Las Vegas. Go drop 1k to 2k in Vegas on a few hands of Black Jack. Then you will believe that EVERYTHING is random!

As in it went real unresponsive when I went to adjust the dimmer setting. I may have messed something up while playing with those numbers so feel free to ignore this peculiarity.

Can I try anything to help you?

Right. I have now completed my experiments, and I can only conclude that the problem IS temperature related.

BOTH my units show identical results. If the unit is cold (below around 22 Deg C for me, measured with Hijack) they experience the dimmer issue. After being in use for a while, the problem disappears COMPLETLEY.I tried rebooting them too, to check if it system uptime related, its not.

I even put it back in the fridge to cool it down. After reaching 8 Deg C (again, read from Hijack) the problem was back, and yes, again after warming up to 20+ degrees all was fine. I normally leave my empeg in the car (which is garaged) and temperatures get down to about 2 Deg C but never freezing, so I guess I notice this problem more than most.

I went out this evening in the car. After returning to go home, the empeg which was in the boot (getting cold) showed the problem. By the time I got home (15 mins) it was cured. I then powered it off and back on. Still working FINE (because it's still warm)

Software version makes no difference. I'm running 1.03 on one unit, and b11 on the other, both behave identically.

I have repeated this about half a dozen times now. Somebody please take note. I will pass this onto support and hope they can help. Its gotta be a dodgy hardware component as obviously most users don't have this problem (including a friends unit)

Both my units are dated 15.05.01 (on the small sticker on the unit itself), it would be interesting to know what you guys have got, perhaps it's limited to a batch of units.

Time to get out the freeze spray?

Mine is 12-05-01...
I cannot verify a temperature dependence... At least if the temperature is 34C -indors, after a while of usage- and forcing the player in DC mode using Hijack to get the settings/dimmer menu, the player still has the bug...

Thank you very much for taking the time to veryify my results. All I can assume is one of the components is very unresponsive at a certain temperature. I hope its not something like bad ram. I don't know anything about the way these units work. I'm glad you could veryify what I found though, it is defnitly repeatable. I know acurasquirrel also verified this for me at like 3 in the morning last night. I appreciate so many people helping me out on this temp testing. I feel the answer to the problem is near at hand!

I work in the technical field. I have seen things done by operators where a certain batch of product (all made by the same guy) only has say, half of something soldered to the board. I have also seen chips not fully inserted and various other things. I hope it is something simple like only half of something soldered down to the board. If it isn't obvious, support will have to cool separate components to see which is failing...

I don't think mine is tempeature related now that I think about it. I was almost convinced it was due to it happening most of the time when I left the unit in the car. But about a week ago, I had the empeg at my desk all day playing. At the end of the day, I packed it up in it's case, went outside to mild weather, and plugged it in. And it had the dimmer problem.

And earlier I said I would see what happens when daytime brightness is set to 90%, but I just realised I have also seen the problem when I haven't turned on my headlights. Most mornings I don't since it's bright enough, and it has happened in the morning as well.

I won't attack your scientific method. It is possble too that whatever part I have that fails from 0-24 degrees, the part you have fails all together. It seems like the more people do the temperature test, I am seeing more of a spread of peak thresh holds. Seems to me like its somewhere around 22,23,or 24 degress C. That would explain too why I dont see this problem when it is very warm outside and I always see it when my player is cold in the morning...

It can happen too when its in your car and the headlights are off. This is because the dimmer option is still active in your car when the headlights are off, its just that the dimmer is set to 100% (you can adjust the dimmer with your headlights on or off, there are two dimmer settings.but you can only play around with one of them while you are in the house if you force dc mode). Until mine warms up, I can turn the headlights on and off 10 times and get 10 different brightness levels without ever changing the setting. It just does whatever the heck it wants...

HOLY SH-T DUDE "15/5/01"
Do you think there is a pattern here?
Inspected by l.couil
or L.Covil

Same date.... I wonder if its a bad lot or a bad inspect. I remember when I ordered mine that the guy told me they "found a pallette" of 60 gig machines...

Lets see if anyone else has this date on theirs....

Inspected 18/5/01

Mine was inspected by "EP". No date specified. But the first four digits of my serial # are 0401, which means it was manufactured in April of 2001. Anyone else with this problem have the same manufacture month?

Does anyone have this problem on anything other than a 30 gig model?

Yeah, mine is the 60 gig.

20 here

My empeg Mark 2 has always had a dimmer problem. Adjusting the dimmer does nothing. But it has always been bright enough for me, so I haven't bothered to report it. Should I try this voltage measurement to check wether it is correct?
(I have tried adjusting both with the knob and the remote, the bar moves more correctly with the remote, but noe of them dimms the display)

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

Does anyone notice that the lower two or three pixel-rows of the display are darker? At least if brightness is set to, say 50%? Maybe this is related to the dimmer prob...