My DC-MP3 Showtime Director finally bit it! Guess I overworked it!

[Orville]

Going on the 3rd year with my DC-MP3 Showtime DIrector and at 4pm EST it opted to finally stop functioning,

 

All of a sudden the FM radio station went dead, dang, what happened now?  Went out to the shed to check out what might have occurred and found my DC-MP3 Showtime Director showing a steady red LED {Error} and the green LED both on, should have only been the green LED.

 

Okay, maybe something got corrupted, let's try reloading firmware, nope, that wasn't it, same issue.

Well let's try cleaning the cat5 contacts, nope, not it either, still have a solid red and solid green LED, definitely not normal.  Tried resetting it numerous times, no go.

 

Well darn, it's not going to work.   So wrote a simple show to the SD card, inserted it into the Director, nothing, just a solid red LED and a solid Green LED, the LED's never flashed sequentially as they are supposed to when the SD Card is inserted, or at least that is how it's worked for the last 2.5 years.

 

Fortunately I learn very fast and learned real quick how to set up and do a show using the PC, fortunately I also have a spare PC in the Shed for sequencing, which has now been converted to my show computer, until I can get the pesky MP3 Director replaced or repaired.  Also learned real quick how to set the volume on the computer going to my FM transmitter for optimum performance without burning it up or having static in the background.

 

Have no idea what happened to my DC-MP3 Showtime Director or why it's giving me the solid red and solid green LED at the same time, it was working fine, then just errored out with this.

 

I can connect a controller to it and it powers it up, but useless since it won't read the SD card or extinguish the red "error" LED.

 

Guess I'll have to send it back to LOR to let them check it out and see what happened and maybe why it happened, and see if it can even be repaired, but that's got to wait until some time next year.

 

At least the show will still be able to go on {whew!} , just had to do some major rearranging of where I had things located in the shed.