Hello,
I acquired an Alesis Ion for parts. Voltages and clocks on main board are OK but the screen gives this message:
“I’m sorry. I seem to have experienced an internal error. Please reboot. If this problem persists please contact Alesis technical support” Power cycle or pressing reset button on main board does not resolve.
Is this likely from a failed firmware upgrade? Would anyone at Alesis (In Music) support be able to help? Or have they ceased support for older synths (circa 2003)?
If I bought an aftermarket ColdFire debugger (BDM connector), I could trace the code and see where it gets hung up. But without a new code image, I doubt I can recover from corrupted flash. Anyone seen this issue?
Ion problem resolved - just an update to others who may encounter the same issue.
The Ion mainboard cannot boot alone - it must be connected to the left side panel board - as the CPU performs a calibration/sanity check of the circuit that reads the pot knobs, pitch bend and mod wheels. There was a bad transistor (Q19 MMBT4401) that provides the POT_REF voltage. A previous owner appears to have tried to repair the MOD wheels - which may have shorted POT_REF to ground - drawing excess current through Q19 - causing it to fail.
I should also add that correspondence with InMusic brands tech support said that this issue could also be caused by bad wiring of any of the 3 pots (Pitch, Mod1 , Mod2) at boot up. If they are not in the expected range.
Ion now passes all diagnostic and calibration tests, except EEPROM (Microchip AT24C16) fails. Even with “bad” EEPROM, the Ion works fine for me - good sound, knobs/buttons OK, mod/pitch wheels, MIDI, keyboard, audio outs, display - all good.
Board is updated to latest OS v1.06.
I also noticed the User patches are scrambled - would these be stored in EEPROM? EEPROM is only 16K bits (2K bytes) - so likely not.
I wonder if I can just replace the EEPROM with a blank one or would it need to be serviced by an Alesis tech? I have a sniffer tool that can read I2C traffic - so I might try to pull out the bytes and see what I find before attempting replacement.
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I updated all four banks (Red, Green, Blue and User) with the Alesis factory Sysex files. Also sent the Setup sysex file. All completed successfully - but the diagnostics EEPROM test still fails. Is there a binary file image of the EEPROM someplace? I am an embedded software developer and could rig up a I2C programmer to write the file into a new EEPROM and replace the one on the mainboard.
Again, the Ion appears to be functioning OK - so maybe the Failed EEPROM is not a concern?