Forum

I was setting up my Alpha at a rehearsal the other day, and started up Eigen D as soon as I could to get the long startup out of the way. I then realised I'd forgotten to turn on the base station, and thought I'd have to load EigenD again, but as it was it picked up the Alpha quickly and started running fine. This seems to imply that the long startup is purely loading things into memory on the host computer, not into any memory in the Alpha or the base station.

To further this experiment, I tried hibernating my MacBook with EigenD running, and it works for short hibernations, but if you leave it too long, then when the Mac wakes up, EigenD shows 'Stopped' instead of 'Running' and you are then forced to restart it or load a setup which puts you through the long startup again. Shouldn't EigenD survive hibernation indefinitely, and then connect to your Alpha once you plug in the base station and Alpha?

If this is easily achievable this would dramatically reduce setup time, since you could leave EigenD running permanently, and just wakae up your mac when you go on stage.

EigenD should indeed survive hibernation just fine (and has been tested in the past to do so) - this is a bug by the sound of it Geert is quite correct, if EigenD says 'stopped' it has crashed in some way. That rather uninformative status is left over from when you could start and stop EigenD - we don't bother with that anymore as no one ever used that function outside of the dev team and it will be changed in the GUI revamp coming.

We've tested all the different connection orders (and making them all work properly took Phil a long time to get right, USB is a bit of a pain that way) and they should be fine, and disconnecting an Alpha and reconnecting it to a running EigenD is a quite normal thing to do.

I'm surprised that the length of time of the hibernation makes any difference at all -that's really weird. Could you make a bug report for this? It will help us try to reproduce the problem...

John

I have been investigating this, and there does appear to be a problem with long periods of hibernation. We will obviously look into it further but in the meantime it does seem that it is often possible to get the Alpha to work again from this state by unplugging and replacing the USB connection with the computer whilst EigenD is still running. If you could still send a bug report when it happens again that would be helpful.

I will keep you posted on our progress on this matter.

Sam
Eigenlabs Software Department

I installed 1.1.0 unstable 12 a short while ago and that _may_ have cured the problem - I've had at least one occurrence of bring the mac out of hibernation after 24 hours or so, and upon inserting the USB from the basestation it finds the alpha within a second or two and you're up and running. I'll keep a watch out to see if the problem re-occurs.