Interesting little 'adventure' today. I came out to my truck after work and found not only a dead battery but my player seemed to have lost all its settings! From button illumination levels, to EQ settings, to my visuals and 'info' settings - All were gone. Now the question that's eating at me is: Did the dead battery cause the empeg to 'revert' or did the empeg somehow fail and take the battery with it (BTW the battery was purchased new less than 7 months ago)?

I'll recap the day as best I can.

This morning: Same as any other Winter morning. Remote started my truck and after it warmed up I got in, inserted the empeg (which sleeps indoors) and off I went to work. Left the empeg in the truck as it's a secured parking lot and the temp was warm for Feb.

This afternoon: Needed to run some errands so I took my lunch hour to do so. Again, got in the truck, key started it this time, and drove around doing errands. Drove back to work and same as this morning left the empeg in the dash. I wasn't paying any particular attention to it but I don't think it was on when I left the vehicle.

This evening: Came out after work just wanting to weekend to begin. On the way to the truck I remote-started it. lights dimly lit and the truck tried to turn-over. No dice! Got in and tried to key-start it only to confirm that there wasn't enough juice in the battery. Got a jump-start and as I was driving I noticed that the empeg's buttons weren't lit up, auto-volume adjust (and just about all other) Hijack settings were off/reset, and the playlist was wrong.

When I got home I restored the dynamic data and re-sync'd the empeg. Had to manually tweak all the Hijack settings back to the way I had them.

So did the battery kill the empeg or did the empeg kill the battery?

A fair chance it was the latter.

There is a rare and intermittant bug with some empegs/installations where the empeg starts up all on its own and the stereo system plays merrily away until the battery voltage drops down to around 10-11 volts, at which time the empeg quits due to low voltage.

The engine in my car is old enough and loose enough that it will still start when there isn't enough voltage to run my empeg, but that is an unusual circumstance.

As to why your empeg settings were lost... no idea unless it was a byproduct of low voltage when the player finally stopped.

tanstaafl.

Interesting;

A few months ago my Girlfriend's battery died a few times when she'd left her player in the car overnight. She was also seeing intermittent disk errors at the time so I replaced her IDE ribbon. Also, since the battery was a stock 2003 we replaced it. She hasn't experienced any issues since then. She also didn't lose any settings when it happened.

I hadn't equated the two issues till I read your post.

Any way, short of putting some sort of toggle on the +12v lead, to prevent this?

Yeah, pull the empeg a centimetre or so out of the cage when not in use!

Someday we'll find/fix the bug..

I would've expeted a soltuion that's a little less 'obvious' from you Mark.

I can easily picture: mlord emerges from his workshop covered in sawdust and solder. Then posts a 'simple' new fix that, along with a new version of Hijack, will solve the player issue, world hunger and global warming.

Thanks for the help.

Mine used to do this when it would get a stray remote signal from something nearby. I changed my shutdown time to 5 seconds and the problem hasn't arisen since. Basically if the blue light is flashing, the player is still looking for input. Any button press will wake it up and it will play 'till there is no power left.

Okay, first things first.

Generic loss of electricity to the empeg doesn't make it lose all its settings, as far as I know. That kind of malfunction has been known to happen on occasion, but it's generally not related to a car's battery dying, as far as I know.

Your description of the settings that have been lost is interesting, because all of the settings you listed were ones stored on the hard disk, either in the dynamic data partition or in the config.ini file. I'm guessing you've got generic disk trouble causing that one.



As was already mentioned, some empegs have been known to malfunction by waking up when they are supposed to be asleep. The entire FAQ entry is here, but we still haven't narrowed down every single possible cause for it. One thing: So far, I haven't yet heard a report of the wakeup problem coinciding with a lost-settings problem or disk drive trouble.



Now here's where it gets interesting. You purchased that battery for a reason: Because the prior one was dead. Perhaps there's a problem with the vehicle's charging system, perhaps completely unrelated to the empeg.

We could be looking at multiple simultaneous unrelated failures here.

Or maybe it really is all related. There's a possibility that there's a wiring fault of some kind with the empeg installation that's causing all of this. Are you seeing any other weirdness that you're not telling us about?

I'm fairly certain this isn't a disk issue. When the last one went, over two years ago, it was fairly obvious what the symptoms were. Just to make sure though I did check the IDE solders and replaced the IDE ribbon.



The simple answer is no. The truck is an 02 and the battery was stock. It went dead due to a moment (okay, an overnight) of stupidity on my part.

That being said I've developed a theory as to why this 'may have' happened:

I left the truck that afternoon and for whatever reason -bug, stuck buttons or a stray kenwood remote signal- the player turned back on and drained the battery. When I remote started it later that evening the battery had enough power to light up the electrical system but not crank the starter. As it's programed to do after a start failure the starter then re-tried a few times before I was aware of the issue. I imagine that the cycles of booting, rebooting and voltage loss basically tortured the poor player for a period of 3-4 minutes. During this time it lost its settings.. Just my theory.

More on the remote starter - For a little more background check out this post (althought that was written about a different truck with the same type of RS module.) Essentially what happens during a remote start is: Power is applied for ~5 seconds giving the empeg enough time to start a boot process. The vehicle then starts which drops the voltage to the accessories line and causes the player to lose power/reboot - prior to the completion of the first bootup.

The really interesting part is that my main and backup players behave differently during this process. The main one (which is the one that lost its settings) will do one of 3 things after a remote start:
Boot normally.
Boot normally and appear to be fine though the tuner will be 'missing'
Boot and get stuck at the version screen (a reboot brings it back normally.)

The backup empeg however does the same thing everytime:
Boots and then reboots and suspends.

Now GM's, like my Girlfriend's Buick, don't seem to have this issue because their accessory circuits are split. The HVAC system tends to live on Acc-1 while the radio is on Acc-2 (or vice-versa.) This is desireable as the radio doesn't power on till the key is turned to the ON position. My Toyota powers all accessories on Acc-1.

It's now painfully obvious that the solution to all of this is to remove the player when not in use. Which I will endeavor to do moving forward. Realizing my shortcommings though, I'll will sometimes forget. All things considered; would it be worthwhile to put in a relay to the empeg's Ignition source - using say the keysense as the trigger (i.e. the ignition line only goes live when the key is inserted)?

Also, based on this FAQ entry, how many "missed interrupts" is within acceptable limits for the IR Transceiver?

I've got over 500 in 2hrs.