Hey Folks - I’ve been searching for the last two days and I didn’t find this questions/response listed anywhere on here or Google in general.
I have a Budweiser Red Light for the last 2 years. Worked perfectly, no issues until last week. Noticed it wasn’t signalling goals anymore and when I went to troubleshoot I noticed the IMP card won’t light up. Tried turning it on and off, removing and reinserting the card, also tried replacing the batteries. Wondering if there is anything else I’m missing or if anyone else ran into this issue. The light itself works fine when I press the TEST button, it’s just the card isn’t lighting up at all.
Guessing the IMP card is dead in the water, just dunno if I’m able to get a new one without buying a whole other Red Light…
If you remove/reinsert, wait at least 20 seconds before putting it in again (if it’s sleeping, then it takes that long to reset as it’ll run from power stored internally).
I’d be surprised if the card had spontaneously died; the issue is likely more an issue with the card’s power supply within the red light. However, you can’t really check that without either (a) buying a new card or (b) buying something else to plug the card into to check it.
I’ve tried contacting Budweiser but they’re “support” is about as useless as I am. If I buy a new card, can I just plug it into the device and it should work as it did previously (if a dead card is indeed the issue?); or do I need to do back-end work to it.
If I can just plug it in, I have no issue paying the $30 for a new card to get my Red Light working again…
Todd, I’m not sure of your electronic experience. You may want to buy the April Card from Sparkfun and use that to test your imp card. Two things … you’ll find out if the imp card is good or not, and you’ll have an April Board to use for other projects.
You’ll power your April Board from a USB cord, like a wall charger used for a cell phone. Plug-in the imp to the board and try blinking it up by using the imp account that you currently have (or create one). You’ll know by logging-in and using the IDE whether it is working or not, plus you’ll see the LED’s doing something. Just seeing the LED’s light up will answer your question about the imp “not doing anything”.
Yep, if the issue is the card, then you’d just plug the card in and it’d work. However, if the red light itself has a hardware fault that fried your current card, buying a new imp and plugging it in again isn’t going to help much.
This is why buying some known good host hardware (the april board, for $12.95) helps, as it tells you whether the card is good. If it is, then that means the red light must be broken.
If the card doesn’t work in the april board, then the imp is broken… but it may still have been broken by the red light.