A $20K Unserviceable TV Graphics Machine

I work at a public access TV station in the Northeast where I am the head IT guy and experienced video technician. Several years ago, we bought an expensive TV graphics machine for our (then-new) studio, which we had just renovated. This machine was an Inscriber Inca and it cost $20,000.

It was built from a regular Tyan workstation motherboard that is familiar to me, as I've been in IT for 30 years, and video for 20 years. That was the last good point about the product.

A few years after we got it, around 2010, the CMOS battery died. No problem, I thought, just pop the battery and replace it. Wrong!

The battery on the motherboard: Where is it? Answer: It's somewhere in the deepest part of the case, under everything. The motherboard was installed in a rackmount case that looks as if it was installed inside another case. The system has a custom SDI video output board and a custom AES digital audio board. The battery is somewhere in the top left corner of the case, where all the video I/O comes into the machine. Stacked on top is the AMD Opteron CPU, three hard drives, and the onboard LSI RAID controller.

It was blatantly impossible to change out the CMOS battery without completely disassembling the machine. The original company was no help: Inscriber was a Canadian company that was bought by another Canadian company, Leitch, which was bought by the big company, Harris. (And, as I write this, Harris has itself decided to quit the broadcast business.)

I arranged to run the Inscriber from a UPS and keep it connected to power at all times, to work around the CMOS battery. This worked for a few years.

Now, it's the summer of 2014. One day, the Inscriber does not power on. I spend the next two days rediscovering why I cursed this machine in the first place. No luck.

I even bought myself a cheap borescope, just so I can poke it into the machine and try to find the dead battery to see if it can be removed. No luck. I could not even get the borescope in there.

The Inscriber's still dead and will be dead until we renovate the control room again next year. It's a nice way to depreciate $20,000. Or not.

Tell us your experiences with Monkey-designed products. Send stories to Jennifer Campbell for Made by Monkeys.

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