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Microvision won't retain patch

I am co-designing a middle school musical, and found an old Microvision that I was hoping to use. I turned it on, and noticed all the channels were barely visible. I went and reset everything I could (this board probably has not been used in a while, and I wanted to start fresh), then selected the default soft patch. I went to the Patch page, and typed "Dimmer 2 [Enter] Channel 2 [Enter]." I pressed the "Dimmer" button to patch dimmer 1 into channel 1, and the "2" disappeared from channel 2. Just for kicks, I tried patching dimmer 1 into channel 1 at 50%, and when I pressed "dimmer" again, "50%" stayed but the "1" from dimmer one disappeared.

I have verified that the digital output is set to "DMX-512," and that AMX and analog outputs are turned off. I did another complete reset, which reset the channel and dimmer count. I checked again, and no dimmers were patched. The channels were still almost completely grayed out. The video output was set to "mono," so I am not sure why anything is anything but white.

I have a Microvision at my church that works fine, so I don't *think* I'm doing anything wrong. I'm hoping that nothing internally is fried, but I have a feeling that may be the case. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Stephen

  • The memory in these is held up by a supercap, so it may just have discharged by being left unplugged for ages.

    Leave it plugged in for a few hours to give the supercap a chance to charge and see if that sorts it out.

    If not, then it's probably just the supercap that's failed - check for leaking and corrosion around it. It's a fairly simple soldering job to swap those out for a new one.

  • in reply to Richard

     The cap is most likely drained as you suggested, but if it isn't, the "filter" capacitors are more likely bad than the 1 farad "supercaps" (C1 and C2) on the cpu board. They are the little yellow guys all over the board which help to keep the individual chips evenly powered. Also just a reminder to use 720K double sided double density floppy disks in case you don't get the problem fixed and just want to use them to save your show. Of course you can also send the console in for repair too :)

    *(disk size)



    [edited by: teiger at 10:52 AM (GMT -6) on Fri, Apr 8 2011]
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