Amazing. You are clearly the right person to have had this fail.

Well, I haven't fixed it yet...

What really annoys me though is the fact that the vendor of the product is clearly not taking its moral responsibility in helping a customer with a defunct piece of HW after it's warranty period. I will personally never ever buy anything of them again.

Jeroen

This player was bought just over a year ago. Here in the Netherlands the warranty starts at the date of purchase - not the date of manufacturing. Furthermore 'moral responsibility' here means that they have the decency to answer emails addressed to their customer support, I can live with an answer in which they state that the player is no longer under warranty or no longer officially supported, but to blatantly ignore any follow-ups to the emails (for about two weeks) is not the way to treat your customers - at least in my opinion. If your opinion differs in that matter than I respect that.

Jeroen

Where did you buy it? The Rio Central was never officailly sold outside the US.

I bought it via some firm in the US and they shipped it here via UPS. Don't remember which firm - if you're interested I can look it up.

Jeroen

I'm more interested in why you think a long-defunct product bought 2nd-hand from someone in another country should carry a warranty.

As for supporting their product, that's another matter. I think they should have the proper documentation to help you out, but it's likely they don't. I think it's even more likely that nobody at that tech support center knows what a Central looks like. The fact that the tech thinks there's a reset button on the unit should be the tip-off. I'm not "in the know," but it seems to me like Rio is an empty shell of a company at the moment simply supporting the portable MP3 players they've most recently sold until their obligation to those customers is up.

Your best resource for help is here, obviously. However, there were so few Centrals sold that many of us here are in the dark when trying to figure out problems that haven't come up yet. The original designers do visit and post to this board, but many have moved-on from Rio and are working from their memory. Those who were at Rio until very recently may not have access to schematics and other technical data anymore to help. Unfortunately, this board is probably the best it's going to get as far as troubleshooting goes.

Well, if the player was bought 2nd hand I would agree, but this one was brand new.

And I must agree with you that customer support has probably never heard of this model either - the reset-button indeed gave that away.

I'll get a new transceiver for the board later today and patch it in. If that doesn't help I will have a very hard time getting the machine going again I fear. If the mainboard is broken then its going to be very difficult (if not impossible) getting a replacement for it. When that happens my next step is going to be to figure out how the display works and once figured out I might be able to replace the MB with an Intel-based one and see if I can find an ARM emulator somewhere in order to run the original software (gonna be fun trying that one out).

Jeroen

IMHO, it's unlikely that you will find a board that would be compatible with the software. The sound card is specific to the device and there's some kind of flash device that holds player state. That's just off the top of my head, there could be more issues. You could definitely use the LCD and attached hardware though. That software was released under the GPL.

I was able to use it to run the interface for a small streaming mp3 app on the central.

The best thing to do is to hook up a level shifter (3v3 <> RS232) to the debug port. The pinout is:

1 - 3v3
2 - TXD (OUT from board)
3 - RXD (IN to board)
4 - blank
5 - GND

It's 115200bps, 8n1, no flow control (like the Rio receiver & empeg-car). You will probably see something illuminating on this console. If at powerup you hit ctrl-T very quickly it should go into a HW test mode which ISTR will do a RAM test and also some very limited IDE tests (ID'ing the HDD).

The RLC-1 from Dontronics (google them) is fine. They don't list it as being 3v3 but I believe all the ones they ship are nowadays. Their plug wiring isn't right for this, but that's easily sorted out.

As for support in Europe - the European ones never got any training on this product as though it was designed in Germany (hw) and the UK (sw), it was never sold here. The US support people definitely *did* provide support for the product, though I've no idea if they do now given that Rio doesn't exist anymore.

Hugo

Here's the link for anyone interested.

http://www.dontronics.com/rlc1.html
~$21 including shipping to the US.

Or here for 7$
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product...03b2b7bc306371#