MusicPal: Fail #3

I'm using a Freecom MusicPal as bedroom radio and alarm clock since 2008. Today it found another way to not wake me up.

Fail #1: UPnP server down

It was 2009 when the MusicPal failed to wake me up for the first time. My home server had crashed at night, thus the UPnP server was not available. The alarm clock was not able to play any music from it and stayed silent.

Since I could not be sure that the home server would alwas be available, I soldered an USB socket onto the radio and put the wake-up-music onto a flash thumb drive.

Luckily Freecom had already prepared for that - the board had contact points, and firmware that had been released a couple of weeks before that actually had USB support. I only had some early hardware revision that did not have the actual USB socket on the board.

Fail #2: Radio hangs

Starting in ~2012, the radio would freeze and become unresponsive while in sleep mode. This could happen during the day, but also happened at 5 times at night during the years until 2016.

A hanging/frozen alarm clock could not wake me up, and so I made it a habit to pull the plug once or twice a week to make it reboot.

Fail #3: USB unavailable

Today, 9 years after buying the radio and 8 years after adding the USB port, I was again not waken up by the MusicPal.

The main menu did not show the USB flash drive anymore, and only rebooting made it available again.

I guess this was the final blow I had to take, and I'll ditch that device. Now the hard task of finding an adequate replacement begins :/ One that has fallback alarm sound baked into the firmware.

Written by Christian Weiske.

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