conductor troubleshooting - card error

[jnealand]

Now it is my turn in the box.  RJ touched up the CF pins for me at the Academy and I finally assembled my conductor.  But now its troubleshooting time. 

The etherdongle is one that I used for last years show and is a known working commodity using pixelnet software.
I have reflashed it with the new v69 firmware for the conductor using a pickit 3 and the ver1 programmer.

I formatted my CF cards using the disk management formatting since the windows explorer format would not work with a 16k allocation size.  Running on a Win 7 machine with 12gb RAM and 1TB hard drive.  The connection from the computer to the ETD is the same one I used yesterday to test some controllers using a second ETD so I know the communications are good.
The battery is inserted and the red light comes on the conductor when I power up.

I have one sequence called test1seq and one audio file called test1.ogg.
Using the control panel that came with the v69 update -
I created a password
I created a show called test1.sho
I created a schedule called test1.sch
and there is a file called playlist.dat on the card

When I insert the card and restart the control panel all I get is "card error"

I don't have lights connected up at the moment to my active hub as I just wanted to see if I could see the card via the control panel. and maybe see if the music played.

[rrowan]

I don't see the password file in you attached photo.

Rick R.

[keitha43]

Yes even though you first start the utility it asks for a password. That in itself doesn't create a password. Use the button to create the password where you see the create show and schedule buttons.

[jnealand]

added the password file.  Still get "card error"

[keitha43]

I would use a magnifying glass and lightly push on each pin of the socket with a toothpick. One may still not have a good connection and need resoldering.

[peteandvanessa]

I had a similar problem with the conductor, mine wasn't a card error, mine just reported that it wasn't connected.

I had to use a magnifying glass, some solder flux and a fine solder tip to reflow every connector on the flash card header.

My flash card header was under some tension, when you reflow the pins, they tend to pull OFF (actually they spring up off) the board, so I pushed down lightly on the header pins to get them re-attached to the PCB. It took three or four goes at reflowing, but it's working great now.

[jnealand]

You guys are too smart.  I did find one pin that was not connected.  Reflowed that pin and now I can see the show from the control panel and if I select play the show, I can hear the music with some computer speakers hooked to the audio out.  Next up will be to finish all my hardware firmware upgrades and then test with some lights.  But that probably won't happen for a couple of weeks.  At least I know it plays music and is controllable from the computer.  Now I need the cases with the conductor cutouts from the current ETD coop.   Thank you, thank you.

[RJ]

Wow guess I did a poor job fixing it for you. sorry about that!

Glad you got it working!

RJ

[jnealand]

RJ, you also taught me and several others how to do the fix so without that education the device would probably still be sitting around not working until the next academy, so kudos to you.

[peteandvanessa]

Glad to hear it's working. I love it how the board members all club together to suggest solutions to other members problems.