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Help: Diagnosis tools for Pico stability problem

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written by: john

Both the quality and length of the USB cable are very important with the Pico. The first thing to make sure of (particularly as you seem to be suffering problems on all your computers) is that this is OK. You need a heavy wire gauge cable and if in doubt keep it short (the Pico will work with a 5M cable just fine, but only if it is of sufficient gauge). The wire we supply was tested extensively and fulfills he spec properly. Many cables do not. The reason for this is hat the Pico consumes close to the USB power specification at times, and if the wire is not good enough this causes a voltage drop that tends to make it drop off the USB bus. The USB spec allows lighter cables to be made, but only to connect the lower power (100mA for the technical) devices. Manufacturers are not good about being clear on this subject - we have a box of 1000 out of spec USB cables somewhere in our store that we bought before we realised that we could not use them.

We also have a new Windows driver coming out shortly that fixes a current bug that has emerged with the USB subsystem. We think more recent service packs have tickled this one, it's a timing problem in retrieving data and can cause the Pico to drop off the USB bus as well. We're awaiting a new code signing certificate before we can release it, which means it'll probably take a week or two, but it's on it's way. It's possible this may also assist your problem.

John

written by: VelJharig

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 04:25:37 +0100 BST

I've been struggling with issues on my Pico for almost a year now (I tend to work on the issues every 3-4 months and then set it aside again), and originally thought it was a driver issue or software bug. I'm now wondering if I have a hardware issue, and would like to bounce the symptoms off the forum community here for suggestions on possible causes.

Over the last year, I've installed multiple versions of EigenD (the latest round were 1.4.12-stable and 2.0.74-stable) and the Pico 1.0.8 drivers on 4 separate systems. Two are Windows 7 and two are Windows 8 (all with current patches). I'm getting a collection of symptoms that are similar/related on all of them, which is that the Pico doesn't stay powered on for more than a few minutes (even though it remains an active device in Windows device manager), EigenD 2.0.x will crash immediately on switching setups with Stage open (and sometimes so will 1.4.12), and anything done with a VST (Native Instruments Reaktor, for instance) seems to make the issues worse and crashes/shutdowns happen more quickly. A unplugging of the Pico and reconnecting will sometimes bring it back, and sometimes not.

I've gone through every USB port on all 4 systems, removed/reinstalled the Pico drivers, made sure none of the USB ports were being put to sleep due to power saving settings, and swapped USB cables (though I'm not sure I can claim the one I swapped it out for was terribly high quality). I've also installed the software on a brand new system (one of the Windows 8 systems) just to make sure there wasn't some other software variable creating an issue - symptoms don't change.

Other than the above steps, what would you try for basic troubleshooting steps? Are there diagnostic utilities or logging mechanisms that can be accessed to see if the Pico is generating errors to EigenD, or anything similar to that? I work in IT, so I'm not afraid of technical monitoring solutions... I'm just not familiar enough with the options available to troubleshoot issues with Eigenharp connectivity.

If anyone has suggestions, that would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

--Vel


written by: john

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 08:49:25 +0100 BST

Both the quality and length of the USB cable are very important with the Pico. The first thing to make sure of (particularly as you seem to be suffering problems on all your computers) is that this is OK. You need a heavy wire gauge cable and if in doubt keep it short (the Pico will work with a 5M cable just fine, but only if it is of sufficient gauge). The wire we supply was tested extensively and fulfills he spec properly. Many cables do not. The reason for this is hat the Pico consumes close to the USB power specification at times, and if the wire is not good enough this causes a voltage drop that tends to make it drop off the USB bus. The USB spec allows lighter cables to be made, but only to connect the lower power (100mA for the technical) devices. Manufacturers are not good about being clear on this subject - we have a box of 1000 out of spec USB cables somewhere in our store that we bought before we realised that we could not use them.

We also have a new Windows driver coming out shortly that fixes a current bug that has emerged with the USB subsystem. We think more recent service packs have tickled this one, it's a timing problem in retrieving data and can cause the Pico to drop off the USB bus as well. We're awaiting a new code signing certificate before we can release it, which means it'll probably take a week or two, but it's on it's way. It's possible this may also assist your problem.

John



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