Hey Guys,
So, I have an Intellabeam LCD Controller on the bench for repair (yes I know, old controller, but easy to program and great for a few trackspots). Since we've had some down time lately, I've been going through some of our older gear to get it back into good working shape. This particular controller had been on the shelf for a few years. It's an old one, circa 1993 - pre user macros. It had a few issues on the motherboard, leaky caps, bad memory battery, oxide in all of the leaf spring IC sockets, etc. Typical stuff you'd expect for an almost 30 year old moving light controller. So, I got all of that stuff fixed, but it's got an interesting issue. I have a rig of 15 trackspots set up here in the shop, and it runs them fine, except when you go to auto run through pages with delay programmed in them. It seems to ignore the delay somewhat and just go flying through the pages. For instance if you have MSPEED set at 80 and give it 4 second delay, it doesn't delay for 4 seconds, it does delay a little, but probably half of the programmed delay time. This seems to get worse as temperature in the shop heats up during the day, and as the temps heat up it gets to the point where it totally ignores the delay time. I have looked at obvious stuff like supply voltages, etc on a scope. CPU is running as it should at 20 MHz. Everything looks normal. What am I missing?
I'm curious as to where the V25 CPU gets the timing base for the DELAY construct. Also, I did upgrade the Firmware to V1.09 from V1.01 and upgraded the link to V1.4 from V1.3 - so this may be part of the issue as well - I wish HES listed more versions of old firmware than just the latest versions. Sometimes there were issues. Anyone out there have a library of old Lightwave Research firmware files? If so I'd appreciate Intellabeam LCD V1.01 and Link V1.3 binary files (or intel hex) so I could rule out firmware being the issue. You can email me direct at trevor@bplsv.com Thanks in advance!
Anyone ever see this issue before? I used the LCD controllers a lot back in the 90s, it was a great controller, but I never had this issue before.
Cheers,
Trev