macOS: No way to use Waveforms when another FTDI device is connected

[davorin]

Recently acquired two of those Digital Discoveries to use on macOS 10.12.6...

It works nicely, but only if you don't have any other FTDI device connected as well on the Mac...

Either it doesn't detect the device anymore, says that the discovery is busy, or crashes for example my self-built Mac or tells me "DptiEnableEx failed ERC: 0x3, Device opening after programming failed"

Haven't tested with two discoveries at once as the other one is in the office...

 

This is really a show stopper as we have many devices for hardware debugging where a USB serial adapter must be used.

 

 

[attila]

Hi @davorin

Are you using the latest WaveForms version 3.7.5 ? https://reference.digilentinc.com/waveforms3
Could you tell me exactly which USB serial adapter are you using that causes conflict?

@malexander Do you know about similar issues?

[malexander]

@attila I haven't seen any issues when having multiple FTDI devices attached, but all of the testing I've done involved having multiple Digilent products connected. It would be good to know which devices there appears to be a conflict with so that we can try and replicate it locally.

[davorin]

This happens for example with a HiFive-1 Arduino board...see attached screenshot which Vendor/Device ID it is using...

As soon I unplug the HiFive-1 board the device serial number is listed in the dialog in Waveforms 3.7.5....I can select then the device, and after that replug the HiFive-1 board.

 

 

[davorin]

Just kernel panic happened when using HiFive-1 and Digital Discovery together...

- Plugged in Discovery

- Unplugged HiFive-1

- Started Waveforms

- Replugged HiFive-1

- Quit Waveforms -> Kernel Panic

 

Attached crash report amor my MacBook Pro running 10.12.6.

 

 

panic.txt

[davorin]

Please let me know if you need any more and specific debug information about the crashes caused by USB driver...

It seems the crashes are also caused by running the application when no other FTDI device is connected at all...

 

 

[attila]

Hi @malexander,

Do you have any updates on this issue?

[malexander]

@attila

Sorry I got busy with other projects and somehow forgot about this. I was able to replicate this behavior on my MAC by attaching the Digital Discovery and then a board with a blank FT2232H. If I attach the the board with the blank FT2232H first and then attach the Digital Discovery it works fine. I spent some time stepping through the debugger and during the enumeration process it gets to the point where it wants to open a handle to the device by serial number and that call fails with a device not found error code. I'm going to have to dig into this more tomorrow, but I suspect that it's due to a bug in the FTDI driver.

[malexander]

@davorin

@attila

I managed to track this down. It's a bug in version 1.4.4 of the FTDI driver (D2XX library). If I attach a blank FT2232H device (equivalent of what's on the HiFive-1 board) and that device shows up in the device list before the Digital Discovery then the FT_OpenEx function of the D2XX library fails with a device not found error returned when we attempt to open the Digital Discovery. If I take the blank FT2232H device and use FT_Prog to set the serial number field to "1" (e.g. EEPROM no longer blank and serial number string no longer randomly generated by the device) then FT_OpenEx will successfully open a handle to the Digital Discovery, regardless of the order of the device's in the device list.

If I erase the FT2232H and put it back in the blank state I can get FT_OpenEx to fail again. After doing so, I removed version 1.4.4 of the FTDI driver and installed version 1.2.2 (the previous known working version). With version 1.2.2 this issue doesn't exist. Therefore this is a new bug that was introduced by FTDI when they released driver version 1.4.4. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to work around the bug. All I can do is reach out to FTDI and ask them to fix it. In the meantime my recommendation is that customers who experience this problem rollback to driver 1.2.2.

Thanks,
Michael

[davorin]

Hmm..the only FTDI driver I see installed is the AppleUSBFTDI.kext version 5.0.0, no other FTDI driver is loaded besides the Digilent one...

Do you mean the 1.4.4 driver downloadable from the FTDI website? Never installed that one....and my Macbook Pro crashed just again using Waveforms under OSX and Arrow USB Blaster under VMWare 10.

 

 

[attila]

Hi @davorin

Michael was talking about the FTDI driver inside the WaveForms application bundle. 
I will roll back to previous driver version in the next software build. I will try to do this tomorrow.

[davorin]

Ah right...sorry for confusion (o;

Looking forward to the new build :-)

 

cheers

 

[attila]

Hi @davorin

Here you have the build.
Let us know if this helps.

 

[davorin]

Hi attila

 

Works perfectly now on macbook pro :-)

Now time to test on my hackintosh as well (o;

 

[attila]

Hi @davorin

I'm glad to hear it is working.
Thank you for the feedback.