Dead Red Box?

[ecbrusseau]

Just found this forum -- I can't believe I didn't find it sooner  

I have an original Red Box (1.0) that is no longer booting.  No lights, no drive spin, nothing..

I had a "dead" box once before -- which occured during a firmware upgrade, and had to send back to PhatNoise.  This time, however, I was not performing an upgrade at all.. The only thing I had done was to unplug the head unit and remove it (while off).

I'm wondering what to do now.. After searching here, I still don't have a clear understanding as to whether or not the v1.0 boxes will output anything meaningful (e.g. console msgs) from the serial port.  I suspect that even if this was possible, if the bootloader was in some way corrupted this wouldn't matter.

I'm hoping someone here can provide some tips on what (if anything) I can do to get the PhatBox back again..

Thanks!

[judb]

You may want to check to see if the phatbox is getting any power on the cable you have.  it could be the cable went bad.

There are some pin out diagrams linked on the wiki that may cover the red box ...

Have you reseated all the cables and everything?

Also you may need to take the box apart and make sure nothing is loose inside the phatbox.  thats where I would start anyhow.

[ecbrusseau]

Thanks for the reply --

I did check all the cables -- re-seated everything in the box as well.  Even went so far as to check power on the board using a meter -- all looks ok.   As I said, I suspect that the bootloader is toast, but I know of no way to verify.

[judb]

the boot loader is in flash, so it is unlikely that it died.. being that nothing should be writing to the flash.. however it is possible.

there could be other component failure causing the problem but you may want to check the switch that detects if the DMS is inserted as it is the power switch for the box.  if it is worn out it could be the culprit...

if the unit is powering up but not doing anything I don't know what to say, I don't have access to a red box to poke around in.
I assume there is nothing being written to the bootload.log on the DMS (if you have created one)

[ecbrusseau]

No, nothng to the bootlog -- I sorta figured that was a no go seeing as the drive never spun up..

I'll check the power switch -- the unit is quite old, so It's possible..

Anything else you can think of that I could try?

[zero cool]

Are you sure the remote turn on lead is getting power? There should be a connection from the HU that supplies power when the HU is turned on. and a constant 12V feed of which you are probably seeing inside with your meter. One of the lines in your PB cable will be a "changer on" wire. Which wire that is? well i cant help you there. every HU is different.

It puzzles me that you dont have any lights. i would think, that you should at least, have the power light if the unit was at least trying to boot. even if the bootloader was corrupted, the power light should be on i would think.

I don't have any first hand experiance with these, but if i were the one working on it. that is what i would look for next. I would also look for cracked solder connections on the PCB near the PB connector and i would test the PB cable pin for pin to make sure the cable is good.

If all of that is good, then i would start checking to see if the IC's inside had power. thats a bit more involved, you would have to find spec sheets in each IC and figure out what pins are +VCC and -VCC etc.

9 times out of 10 it ends up being something mechanical, especially from what you described. unit worked fine, you disconnected the HU while the power was off. then reconnected the HU and dead box.

I would maybe suspect that the plug end has a bad wire in it at the HU side, or maybe that your radio has a bad solder connection inside where the PB cable plugs in etc...


Best of luck.


Zc

[sbingner]

On the newer versions, if the system has been completely disconnected from power... as soon as it gets power it tries to power up and check the firmware on the DMS.  Not sure if it's the same with the red box but I would expect it to be so.  You could try getting power to it and shorting the pins to make it think a DMS is inserted to test if the DMS detection is your problem.