For a while now, my empeg has been behaving oddly in the car. The main problem is that very often when I start the car, the empeg will boot up properly, but then go to "sleep" mode (screen off plus blinking LED) as soon as it's done initializing. Pressing a button always wakes it up. It does not always do this, but it does very often. It's hard to reproduce. If I have it playing, turn off the car, and wait for the empeg to turn off completely, the vast majority of the time it comes back on properly, without going to "sleep". But I have seen it do the wrong thing at least once during this sort of testing. Oddly, if I leave it in the car and go do my errand (I know -- let's not go off on that tangent), 99% of the time, it does do the wrong thing.

Initially, I was assuming that it was turning on in the car when it shouldn't and that was putting it in "sleep" mode so that when it came back on properly, it started in "sleep" mode. This makes a lot of sense, really, since I have an IR Translate power-on macro that turns the player off when booted up in AC mode, and if the AC socket was twitchy, it could easily do this. However, I've watched it start up in sleep mode when the last mode it was in was definitely "awake". It's also not thinking that it's in AC mode, as I've checked to make sure the DC-only options are there, plus the power-on macro takes about half a second to activate, during which I can see the player app running, and I do not ever see the player app when it does the "sleep"-on-start thing in-car.

Also, I've swapped my empeg out with my backup, and it does the same thing, so I don't think that it's an internal empeg problem. It started happening when I upgraded Hijack at some point (which version I don't remember), but I think that was coincidence, although I haven't actually tried revving down. I'm inclined to say that it's a wiring problem in the dash, especially since I was unhappy with the job of the person that installed it to begin with, but I'm not sure what that problem could be. I'd say that maybe the accessory line isn't connected well, so that when I start the car, it turns the empeg on, but then seems to be off by the time it gets started, but I've never seen the empeg fail to turn on at all, and a line that's intemittent in only one way seems unlikely.

I have also, on rare occaasion, seen the empeg start up without turning the car on, though this definitely isn't the cause of the problem I just described, as, again, I've definitely seen that problem without the empeg starting up on its own. I've not had the backup in place long enough to determine if it also does this. So this problem could be related or not.

So, anyone have any ideas?