darwould

OK thanks - I was sort of waiting for it to fail again before I take it in but I may just bring it in and point the tech to this thread. I've owned Line6 for many years and everything has been rock solid. I certainly don't see this to be a very common problem either just from my googling of this issue. Hopefully with a battery box replacement it never re-appears.

Thanks for chiming in psarkissian. I am almost certain it's the battery box circuit. No leds when pushing the test button. All pins and connetions fine to the battery - verified with an ohm meter on the battery box PCB. When the failure occurrs no regulated voltage is being generated from the battery box PCB to the variax modeling PCB (red, black, white, blue wire harness). I can "simulate" this same failure condition by putting tape on the 3rd terminal on the bottom of the battery. It's a failure of the battery box PCB to correctly recognize a genuine line6 battery even though that 3rd connection is making a solid connection to the PCB and the battery is indeed a line 6 original. No relay click either. Works fine with power from 1/4 inch line6 DI box or VDI. But again to be clear - this problem fixes itself (I am currenlty in the working state waiting for another failure). I left the battery in the charger (not charging) overnight and then everything started working the next day. I'm in the EE business so I'm fairly comfortable with troubleshooting these types of issues. I think it could be one of the following: - problem with the battery box PCB - maybe thermal related that causes it to incorrectly detect the battery - problem with the battery itsetf - some sort of discharge happening by leaving it overnight in the charder (not-charging) that somehow resets the genuine ID circuit in the battery. It would be good to know from line6 if this seems possible. Another possible scenario is that the genuine battery protection scheme has some sort of timeout. Maybe due to some flaw it incorrectly detects a battery for 3 times for example, then invokes a timeout which disallows any battery - this could explain why the system wakes up again after a day.

Totally agree on the VDI comments for live. For practice however, it's nice to know I can grab my guitar with my "bad monkey" and go direct to the board (it has a "not too bad" speaker sim out). Then I have variax models and tunings with a simple setup (and very portable - no amp, no HD500, etc.). Now with this battery issue I'm not so confident in this setup even for the 3 hours we play every week.

Thanks. I also suspected the 3rd connection (spring connection on the bottom of the holder). I cleaned it up making sure the connection was good and also checked electrical continuity to the PCB in the back of the holder. All good but still no green lights. It looks like something else was going on as opposed to bad contacts etc. As you say - it seems ok now and I will keep an eye on it. WIll report back if I learn anything more on this.

Hi - sorry to hear of your issue as well, but at the same time I'm glad I'm not going nuts. I wanted to clarify... by "Leave battery in overnight" do you mean, 1) in the charger charging? 2) in the variax? or 3) in the charger "not" charging and not plugged in? In my case #1 and #2 did not fix my issue (tried them both), but #3 may have. I say "may have" since I also plugged the battery into another variax first so not sure which one fixed my issue. Since you have 2 batteries I don't expect it to be battery related. Since you did not mention another variax I don't think that did it for me either. So then I assume it's leaving the battery in the unplugged charging cradle overnight that fixes this somehow. So much for being confident in this thing. I did like the idea of playing a gig on battery power but now I can't be confident. It's not the end of the world dropping to mag's but I play alot of alternat tuning.... popping out of tune at a gig is a show stopper.... literally. A few more questions - do you ever power your variax with the VDI cable or the line 6 external 1/4 power DI box? If so - do you leave the battery in? Just trying to see if this is a common thing between our issues. When I looked at the back of the battery box (unscrewing it from the variax), there is a small PCB with a chip on it. This must certainly be part of the "genuine battery" check circuitry. Somehow it seems to me that this might be failing. If it happens again to me I will take it in for service and ask them to replace the battery box in the variax... or at least point them to this thread before they start troubleshooting.

We'll I came to this thread with some very strange battery issues. For starters - this is a new Variax with original charger and original line 6 battery. The battery worked fine for about 3 recharges, then on the 4th full charge the guitar lost power after about 1 hour. Nothing, no 4 green lights, no flashing single green light. Press the test button and no lights. I charged the battey and the red charger LED was blinking as though it was fully charged right away. I tested the battery and it read 8.46v - or fully charged. I tried leaving the battery on charge overnight, I also left it in the variax overnight - no sucessess after each of these steps. I then planned to take it in for service. So I left the battery in the charging cradle "not plugged in" and waited a day or so to take it in for service. So now I'm at the service centre and we do a quick test to see if the battery is good. My battery powers up another variax just fine. So now I'm sure it's my guitar right!! ... just for kicks I plug the battery into my guitar... and.... guess what, works fine! You might be thinking that it's a loose wire in the guitar, but I assure you, I had the battery box out, wiggled all connections, and nothing. I plugged the battery in about 50 times when it was not working and all I would get is anywhere from 1 - 3 seconds of 4 green lights, then everything goes dark. And now that it's working - I'm seeing it continue to work regardless of how many times I re-insert the battery. Not looking like a loose wire in my book. So now, I'm going to watch this closely. It's either 1) that the battery was in the cradle overnight bleeding some current in the battery (not plugged in), or 2) Plugging the battery into the other Variax somehow reset the battery! As one other post mentioned, I certainly think this is due to some convoluted scenario with the "genuine battery detection" circuitry. It could be that the battery gets a static zap or something that confuses the ID chip in there and it needs to be reset, or there is some other handshaking going on that gets permanently confused until the battery gets placed in another guitar. I should also note that sometimes I use a VDI cable with an HD500 which powers the guitar and I leave the bettery in the guitar. Nowhere does it say this is bad or should not be done, but maybe this causes the issue I experienced somehow. I know this sounds wierd, but something strange is definitly going on. Hopefully this helps someone. If this happens again I will post back with more details.