Is My Elk M1G About To Fail?

[upstatemike]

I have a lot of inputs on my M1 set up to announce things when chime is active so I can keep track of motion sensor triggers and door openings through the day. Today my voice announcements stoopped working. They were working this morning but now when something is triggered all i hear is a little static to indicate the audio circuit has engaged but nothing is said... kind of like playing a blank voice slot? This is not the first time this has happened and the other times it just started working again after a few hours but I am concerned. Does this indicate that the controller is on the verge of failing? If I can't trust voice announcements what else might not work when I need it? Maybe the fire alarm?
 
Was wondering if this is a known problem and if it means I better get a backup unit ready because the thing is about to fail? 

 

[RAL]

I haven't run into this problem before, but your description does sound like something is failing.
 
The M1 uses a separate voice chip to generate all the voice announcements.  The M1's microprocessor controls the voice chip, so it's possible that either one could be bad.   But if everything else still seems to work ok, a bad voice chip would be my first guess as to what's wrong.
 
On my M1, the voice chip is an ISD4004, marked U6, near the serial port DB9 connector.  It is in a 28-pin DIP package and is socketed.  There's always a chance that the problem is simply a bad connection from the socket to one of the pins.   If you feel comfortable removing and re-inserting the chip from its socket, that would be worth a shot.
 
If you had a spare M1 board, swapping chips would be an easy way to check if it is a bad chip or not.
 
Unfortunately, you can't simply replace the chip with a new one, as all the voice data is programmed into on-chip flash memory.  But maybe you could convince Elk to sell you a new, pre-programmed chip rather than sending the M1 back to them for service,

 

[upstatemike]

Just went into ElkRP and did a "speak and send" on one of the zones and it spoke fine. Then went back and triggered a few sensors and they now speak fine. Don't know if ElkRP did anything or if it fixed itself before I went in to test it.

 

[RAL]

Just went into ElkRP and did a "speak and send" on one of the zones and it spoke fine. Then went back and triggered a few sensors and they now speak fine. Don't know if ElkRP did anything or if it fixed itself before I went in to test it.

It might be that RP reset something that got things working properly again.  But still could be a bad connection at the socket that happened to clear up at around the same time.   Guess you'll have to keep an eye on it.