I'd like to point out that I've tried a friend's empeg and his does the same thing in my car (but not in his own). It's got to be a in-dash-wiring issue. I'd just like to figure out what it could be before I start tearing things apart. Of course, it'd make sense to just go ahead and rewire, since I don't trust the installer that did it anyway.

What about your empeg in his car to cover all bases?

I trust my installer (it was me of course). I only have one empeg and don't really know anyone to try theirs so I can't verify that it's my install at fault.

My idea is probably flawed. The only way that I think this could really be the problem is if at the penultimate shutdown the player was in standby. I guess this is feasible, especially if the player is used at home a lot too:

1) On AC power. Player put into standby because it's bedtime. Screen turns off.
2) Player pulled from dock whilst still in standby. Flash saves correctly.
3) Player inserted into car, gets correct settings (including expected standby).
4) Player brought out of standyby and used. Then pulled, whilst screen is busy and disks spun up. Flash not written correctly.
5) Player inserted - settings are obtained from the AC save again.

Of course, low voltage in the car would probably exacerbate this problem - the power during shutdown is coming from the empeg's power supply stage capacitors. I haven't checked, but presumably there are two capacitors, one at the car '12V' input (which will probably be higher than 12V), and one after the regulator which will be a constant voltage regardless of car. The amount of energy stored in the first capacitor will be proportional to the car's voltage squared, and presumably the power dies when the voltage here drops below that needed to sustain the regulators.

Again - still only speculation. It does need a specific sequence of events, which should make it easy to disprove.

I don't think that your scenario fits what I'm seeing, as I can start the car and have the player start up asleep and then leave it asleep for whatever reason (usually the wife being in the car at the same time). Then park, turn off the car, leave the empeg in the dash, shop, come back, crank the car, and have the player start up awake. This doesn't happen very often, but it definitely does happen.

If it's the case that the player is just falling back on an old sleep setting, why would it get changed without intervention?

Hmm...I'm not even sure how long the entire save sequence takes anyway. Blanking the screen is going to take on average 12.5ms, worst case 25ms. I wouldn't have thought that would be fast enough. I haven't checked the flash specs, but I don't believe it would take that long to write 128 bytes... (2.5M CPU cycles)

Blanking the screen by writing all zeros to the display buffer should be much much faster than milliseconds.. more likely a couple hundred microseconds -- could be a reasonable alternative to actually handshaking with the PIC to turn off the display entirely.

Cheers

Isn't the refresh rate of the display locked down somewhere by hardware? Can we beat up on the 1/40s rate from within hijack?

I've come to discover that if I turn on the accessory power in the car, but don't crank it, everything goes fine. But if I crank it immediately from off, it sleeps when the boot sequence is finished. In addition, if I let it boot up under accessory power, then crank it, the display blanks, which I'd expect, then comes back on with a battery icon, but does not sleep.

So it sounds like a voltage issue. Is it likely to be the main power (as opposed to ignition voltage), and, if so, how should I correct that? A better run for the power than coming through the stereo plug where I assume it's coming from now?

Hmm. Sounds plausible. The question is whether it is the player or the kernel that is responsible.

Yeah, I've never not seen the battery icon -- I was just being complete in my description.

The issue is, though, that if there's not enough power available to the empeg at boot/crank time, how do I resolve that?

My empeg battery line is wired direct to the battery (yes, via a fuse) and has been for a long time. The battery itself is only about 18 months old and is a good quality Bosch Gold unit.

If anything my accessories line might be a bit suss since the ignition switch in my car is pretty old and loose. Perhaps it's going low at a particular time during the boot sequence that's causing the problem? Would match Bitt's tests.

As for putting the empeg in every time, that's going to be damn annoying. 1) I park in a locked garage at night and 2) my car sits about 10 meters away at work, so normally the empeg stays in the car. That will just put extra wear on the sled and connector.

The thing is though this has only started to happen for me in the past few months and I haven't changed anything. So something must have changed either in the empeg or the wiring. I believe my wiring is pretty good though and should last longer than this.

Hmm. Maybe a dirty contact?