Well, I have made some progress on debugging my Empeg. Wow, I never thought I'd say that I needed to debug my headunit!
I opened her up today, and changed the ribbon to the end connector. That seemed to solve the problem with the hard drive ending up "missing" once in a while. While it was open, I installed the 1 amp 200 volt diode inline with the switched power.
BUT
I'm STILL getting the weird syndrome where the power comes back on after I leave it in the car! I haven't figured out how long it takes for this to happen, but I know it's within 2 hours of turning the car off. I come back outside, and the blue light is blinking. The unit is unresponsive, so pushing the buttons and turning the car on doesn't change its state. Only pulling it a half inch out of the cradle and pushing it back into place makes it reboot.
I'm running the 2.11 Hijack kernel, I've installed a diode to kill the negative spike bug, and I've reseated the laptop drive.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on here? I'm tempted to install some kind of kill switch on the damn thing! I hate to tear apart my dash AGAIN just to see what the voltages are of my input leads. If I was really smart, I'd hook up a LabView terminal and log the voltage on the ground, the main and switched power, and the LED. That's, however, a last resort. My car (Audi) has a floating ground... maybe something to do with that?
Thx
- James