Thanks Mark! I just made up a proper cable to connect from the AUX input to one of our bench supplies. We still get strange operation with the IR transceiver, but it goes away once the Empeg is turned on. We still don't any lights and the dimmer control still doesn't work. If anyone is curious, the display and receiver half of the extender draws 270 mA, except when running with the Empeg turned off. Then it jumps to 420mA. As for power up sequence, it's probably best to have the power going to the display first. We booted up the Empeg first and noticed the display faintly running with no power. Now that's some serious drive on the signal lines.

Mark, does the dimmer work properly with yours? We can set the dimmer to any value we want, but the display remains at 100 percent brightness except maybe for a brief blip of 0 percent level. It's as if the control PIC is not sending the proper bits out to the digital potentiometer. Since the same PIC also controls the LEDs on the illumination kit, the propblem is clearly related. Please let us know if you can check the dimmer.

Thanks,
Stu