Producer II+ Losing Programming

[townclown]

Not sure if this is the proper forum or not. If it is I apologize. Our church uses this old beast for our lighting. We turn it off after every service and it's worked rather well for 26 years. The last couple of weeks we've come in and turned it on and it's lost all our show programming. Is there a battery in there that's finally died? Some type of memory gone bad? Any explanation? We're at the point of just leaving it on 24 x 7 now until we figure out how to fix or if we need to replace it.

 

[Les]

The first thing I'd do is open it up and look for a battery, which hopefully hasn't leaked everywhere. It'll be on the main processing board. It could be soldered in place, so be prepared for that, and of course be prepared to lose any programming as you will need to disconnect the console from power before opening it up.

 

[microstar]

The easiest path is to contact Teatronics for information at 805-438-4000 or email Jim Joffee thru their website: teatronics.com.
The manual is available on their website as well if you don't already have it.

 

[mikeydoesstuff]

Your hard drive may be failing.

 

[microstar]

Your hard drive may be failing.

The console was produced around 1998. It uses a 3.5" floppy for storage of cues. It does not have a hard drive.

 

[mikeydoesstuff]

It doesnt use short term memory at all? You power up and theres nothing until you load the disk?

 

[GreyWyvern]

It doesnt use short term memory at all?

It obviously uses short term memory. No one said it doesn't. All that was said is that it doesn't have a hard drive, which may or may not be true. Even if it does, that is not the problem as it sounds like the console is starting up fine and has just lost the programming that was done.

You power up and theres nothing until you load the disk?

It may not even have a 3.5" floppy drive as that is an optional upgrade. As the OP states,

The last couple of weeks we've come in and turned it on and it's lost all our show programming.

That leads me to think it doesn't have the disk drive, otherwise there would be no problem. Just pop the disk in, load, and go!

I think Les is right on with looking for a battery. If the battery has worn out, the console won't be able to store the programming in its memory while the board is powered down. The length of time it is powered down may affect it also. It may be able to retain the programming for a day, but not a week, for instance.

 

[microstar]

No, it uses some sort of battery or supercap supported RAM typical of consoles of that time period. I'm not for certain when hard drives were first used in lighting consoles, but most early memory consoles did not have them, only floppy drives to back up the internal memory chips. The manual says the floppy drive is optional. Here is the link to the manual: http://www.teatronics.com/MANUAL/p_.pdf

 

[SteveB]

Only had an optional floppy drive, and not many did as it was a later feature.

Battery might have served as trickle to hold memory. ETC used a big capacitor on the Microvision in place of a battery.