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Tiny Lockit lock up and random reboot.


Rasmus Wedin

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Hi!

I've been using a tiny Lockit to jam a 633 with a Sony XDCAM, leaving it on the cam throughout the day, running on rechargeable AAAs.

It's been working fine the last 5 weeks, but this weekend it started acting weird.

First when I went to re-jam it at lunch I saw it ha restarted the clock, and was not following my time of day anymore. I went back and checked the footage and it had basicly been in sync with me for an hour or so and the suddendly at the next clip the time code had started from zero again. Batteries was still charged and it was running.

Then yesterday when I was jamming it with the 633, it jammed, ran for a fem seconds, and then i froze, display and all. happened a few times.

I let it rest for a bit going wired TC since we were doing interviews. A few hours later I fired it up again and it seemed to run fine. I swapped the rechargables to regular AAA just in case it had to do something with the Voltage.


Anybody know whats going on? I've never encountered this before. Just send it back to the shop or...?

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Hi,

this definitely seems related to power supply. Had you set the battery type in the Sys/Config/Bat menu to "NiMH" when using rechargeables and/or did regular battries work fine (setting at "Alk" or "Li" respective to the cells in use)?

If regular work as expected but rechargeables fail at according settingsI would rather put my 2 cents on the rechargeables being worn out (especially now that temeratures drop).

Please let me know if you need further assistance on that.

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throwing in another 2 C: Rechargables could be OK, but the culprit could be the battery contact. I don't use a tiny lockit, but with it's predecessor "Lanc-Logger" some rechargebles failed to make proper contact to the spring feather over time due to their slightly different measures (narrow contacts surrounded by non conductive paper). I started to insert small balls of aluminium foil between the spring feather and the "+" contact of the AAA facing downwards and everything was fine again.  

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Thanks for hinting towards that. Although it seemed, he has been using these rechargeables with succes until recently, that could definitely be the case and may be worth checking.

Llike the Lanc-Logger ion mention, earlier TLs had a plastic cap on one of the silver cap contacts for reverse poloarity protection which could cause problems with some cells. Reason behind being, manufacturers do not always follow the exact physical specifications in order to squeeze as much capacity in there, so the top contact may get shorter and thicker than specified.

We moved over to gold plated pcb inserts to cater for that since long , they can easily be identified by one dot and one ring shaped contact when looking into the compartment.

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Yeah, something like that could definitily be the case. Just half e second of loss of power would reset it. And yes, it hade been working fine for weeks with the same batteries.

But I'm still puzzled what would lead it to lock up, or freaze like it did. The display still lit up but all numbers just freaze. Very weird. Could that really be down to bad batteries?

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I actually can't think of anything else, given alkalines/lithiums work well. Corroded contacts or similar would limit the current with those as well  - with similar problems at least when drained. This said, we can check it for you but naturally, we would need to see the device here for that.

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I had similar problems with a couple of tiny lockits recently. Turned out they had an issue with battery contacts or powering board that affected the very first units. The solution was something quite simple like putting some electrical tape on the underside of a section of pcb. Wendy's Broadcast in the U.K. spotted the problem and sorted for me.

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Uh jah... wouldn't expect there could still be some ancients out there without that fix. The PSUs are firmly soldered in place on one end and hotmelted on the other since forever now. Still and again: this would affect also using primary cells.

But, @Rasmus: you can check by removing the back lid and gently press on the piggy-back PSU board to reseat it if neccessary. May put a little non conductive foam or hotmelt to secure.

 

 

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