Hugh Iverson
Account Executive

Chicago Tech, Inc. / www.chicagotech.com
4043 N. Ravenswood Ave.
Chicago, IL  60613
800-442-4011 Ext. 6011
773-687-6011 Direct
312-948-9486 Fax
hiverson@chicagotech.com

They only have 1,100 of these chips left…. so hurry ! LOLz  two or four of these will probably last you two lifetimes. They are around $7 each for these (because they are hard to find). These Chips are robust and seldom fail, or so the story goes. Never hurts to be ready for seldom.

Also i had Harrison replace two chips in one of my peri-proc  boards ( model # SN75176BP ) that brought my serial from not working…to working. Harrison did the repair for a really reasonable sum as well…Kudos and thanks to Brian Cox @ Harrison.

I did the same replacement on all my other cards and they were repaired as well. the chips are located @ u47 and u48 on the peripheral processor boards. there are ten identical chips in the same section. Might as well replace them all since they are $.60 (thats 60 cents)  each. Heres where you get those.

http://search.digikey.com/us/en/products/SN75176BP/296-1739-5-ND/277385

I had a ground fault in my mains power that fried the chips. Good ones to know about.

We have experienced very strange behaviours on our beloved S12 recently.

We sometimes had no input from channel 1 to channel 16 right from the powering up of the console. Some other times the sound was entering the channels, but not exiting them (no routing was working). Some other times it was the total opposite: sound was present even when the channels were muted!

Everything was pretty much unpreddictable, by the way…

As it was only on the first channel carrier (ch1 to 16), I checked the processor card of that carrier, and then every channel card.

I found that, on channel 16′s assignment board, one condenser was not good looking (it had leaked).

So I replaced the whole assignment board with a spare one, and that seems to have solved the problem.

BUT, as the problem was very unpredictable, I’m not yet sure that it is definitely solved. We’ll see in use if it stays OK!

EDIT Feb. 2018 : this wasn’t the solution to the problem, as it happened again after changing the assignment board. I eventually found the culprit several years later (!), while doing some cleaning :

After I had removed every channel cards and the brain card from the ch1-16 carrier, I noticed that the backplane (the big card on the bottom of the carrier, with the connectors which the channels plug into) was not tightly secured on the rack chassis, as a number of screws had gotten loose. So I tightened them all correctly and thought “wait a minute, some of those screws are used to bond the backplane’s ground to the chassis, so maybe this is the source of the problem ?”.

And bingo, after I had put every cards back in place, I started the console, and no problem with ch1 to 16. This was last year (2017), and the problem hasn’t happened a single time since !

What was happening was that depending on how bad the connection to the digital ground was, sometimes the serial data was not received correctly by the brain card (it needs this ground as a reference), and the corresponding channels would not start correctly. I also understand now why sometimes just pulling some cards out and then pushing them back in would temporarily solve the problem : it was just pushing the backplane on the chassis and re-bonding the digital ground for a while !

So here it is guys : if you’re control panel acts weirdly on startup, check those backplane screws !

Hope this helps…
Maikol

The touchscreen freezes, mostly while entering a slate for a channel. It becomes nonreactive to touch, and the mac says “Graphic slave has not responded, please save your work and restart”

A few seconds later it says “Autocard has not responded for 30 seconds”.
At the same time the racks are not displaying what they display normally, it’s as if they were disconnected.The only way to get it working again is to reload the code from the mac, or restart the mac itself.But the problem happens again quite immediately after reload if I try to enter a slate!!!

Pretty annoying! Has anyone ever experienced this?

EDIT : problem solved!
JUST TRASH THE “SLATE” FILE IN THE GLW FOLDER!!!

That “slate” file stores all the suggestion the touchscreen gives you when you are typing a channel’s slate on it, so this can get pretty big afters years of using the console. Until a point where it slows down so much the console that the computer thinks the touchscreen has crashed!