Occasionally (20-30%) of the time when my riocar boots up in the car the button illumination level gets "forgotten" and the buttons don't light up. I then go into the hijack menu (v253) and the illumination level is still set correctly but no lights until I change the setting and they come back on. Then when I shut my car off and the player goes into standby mode the buttons stay lit up. I have to turn it back on and turn off the button illumation. This seems to be an issue with hijack, but are there any other possibilities? Power supply, etc.??

In case Mark doesn't read the Technical forum, you might want to cross-post this to Programming (that's the forum where add-on programmers discuss the programs).

This happened to me a lot the first time I tried the hack (on the display board I ended up destroying in the pursuit of a fully funtional illumanated button hack), it's happened once or twice with the second display board.... I'm experiencing random reboot issues now... like on the hour every hour (not that precise but you get the picture) I don't think it has anything to do with the hack but ya never know.

Any flakeyness you see with the button illumination is due to the underlying firmware which actually manages the display. The button illumination parts of that firmware are not used in "the standard product", and are therefore probably not as well tested/engineered as they might otherwise be.

I believe elsewhere Hugo noted that one other side effect of this is that the rotary knob should NOT be used when adjusting the dimmer level, for example.

Not much I can do about it in Hijack, except perhaps re-set the button illumination level periodically --> but doing so causes the buttons to flicker for a second or so, and would probably draw even more complaints.

Cheers

Oh yeah, the well-documented "dimmer fix" hack, which adds a capacitor to one of the signal lines for the display logic, probably alleviates this issue some.

Cheers

The cap fix won't affect the button lighting; the cap fixes a transient glitch in the pic->digital pot 3-wire interface; this pot is in the feedback loop for the 60v display PSU.

The PIC (which drives the button LEDs) doesn't seem to have a problem getting commands reliably, generally at least. But yes, the LED stuff was never well tested as it was just a quick hack to use some unused pins on the PIC.

Hugo

UPDATE
Now this happens all the time. Buttons don't light up at power-up until I adjust the brightness in the hijack menu. Buttons stay lit in standby mode (although they dim somewhat). Makes no difference if display is dimmed already or not at shutdown.

Is anyone else with the button hack experiencing this??

No, I havent seen this particular problem. But I have only had the button hack for a few days. Ill let you know if it comes up. What version of HIJACK are you on?

and btw, Thank you Brian, Mark, and Darkstorm for the empeg face light.

Yeah, I've seen it, along with a couple of other issues that I've been hacking at. Try Hijack v263 which has changed the timing of the illumination commands. (And *please* read the Hijack v263 thread in the Programming forum as well as it explains my changes)

If the buttons don't immediately light upon boot, try flicking your headlights on and off

The standby illumination level is a hijack config.ini option, and defaults to 1. IIRC, I think I get to say "Read the FAQ!" , but I might get egg on my face...