Still pulling out of FTDI hell
potatohead
Posts: 10,255
in Propeller 2
RANT MODE = 1
Man, I spent a ton of time today trying to get Prop Plugs and or the 123 board to talk to a PC. Finally found one Prop Plug that seems to work, until it doesn't, then I change ports, wait, pray to the voodoo gods, and it works again.
Any of you guys have this trouble? Last time I worked with these Plugs and PC, it was stable. Could run for a day, no worries.
That aside, I'm up and running on the new image. DE2 for now, mostly because the 123 just isn't talking. But it's LED's are awesome! So there is that. I'll give it a go on an entirely different machine later on. I'm so @#$(&@)#(&$@#% I just want to write some PASM...
Oh, and screw Apple. I made a GREAT setup with Win 7, Quartus, Virtual Box, and the FTDI support is absolutely horrible. (and yes I did all the remove Apple .kext, dork around with the two MacOS version stuff I found out there and it only ever sort of worked) Maybe I'll come back to that because I really wanted to just use Mac this time around. But not with how things are working.
RANT MODE = 0
Man, I spent a ton of time today trying to get Prop Plugs and or the 123 board to talk to a PC. Finally found one Prop Plug that seems to work, until it doesn't, then I change ports, wait, pray to the voodoo gods, and it works again.
Any of you guys have this trouble? Last time I worked with these Plugs and PC, it was stable. Could run for a day, no worries.
That aside, I'm up and running on the new image. DE2 for now, mostly because the 123 just isn't talking. But it's LED's are awesome! So there is that. I'll give it a go on an entirely different machine later on. I'm so @#$(&@)#(&$@#% I just want to write some PASM...
Oh, and screw Apple. I made a GREAT setup with Win 7, Quartus, Virtual Box, and the FTDI support is absolutely horrible. (and yes I did all the remove Apple .kext, dork around with the two MacOS version stuff I found out there and it only ever sort of worked) Maybe I'll come back to that because I really wanted to just use Mac this time around. But not with how things are working.
RANT MODE = 0
Comments
Hope you get it sorted soon.
Maybe this laptop is getting crappy on USB. Boy, was I PO'ed though.
I don't know where the deal is but some USB devices are not always recognized, like unplugging them doesn't clean the state and then replugging them mean they go into this "non-working" old state... happens to my pickit 3 quite often...no idea if it is ftdi based or no though...
I pretty much need to leave it unplugged, try it until it takes, then go while it works...
Well actually I think there was a problem once with some other program that kept polling the ports and messed it up...
BTW: I use sometimes VirtualBox on MacBook Air with Win10 for Propeller work and it works just fine...
What is your OS on that one? Maybe 10.10 is at issue. I could upgrade. 10.6 was pretty awesome. I had no trouble at all.
Of course, the same could be said for the Win 7 machine I'm on too. Hard to believe both got some mess or other, but anything is possible. I'll trudge through a clean sweep on all COM / USB related things another day.
HERE it is!!
This cleared up my FTDI issues on my 10.10 Mac Mini
So, what I'll do is let it all sit a day. Gonna go up on the mountain to play some. I'll get new cables and pull my old XP machine out as a baseline. It worked perfectly day in and day out, and obviously has NO updates. It should fire up and do what it has always done with this stuff.
If it does, I'm in driver hell. If it doesn't, I'm in hardware hell. But, I'll know at least.
Or, use some old box as a USB bridge ?
And that's the test cycle anyway...
I will probably take the punishment and just make the USB work, whatever that takes. Was just cranky at a large block of fun time got biffed. Might have had a nice bitmap done given the time USB consumed.
Went back a revision, total Smile.
Changed cable. Total Smile.
Connected Prop Plug to old XP machine. Awesome. Same as last time. And that's crappy.
Went back to Win7, everything works golden. ???
I'm not touching it. Both PropPlugs work, even the one that never touched the XP machine this time around.
Voodoo. But I'll take it. Now it doesn't take 10 plug, unplug cycles to maybe run code once.
Went back a revision, total Smile.
Changed cable. Total Smile.
Connected Prop Plug to old XP machine. Awesome. Same as last time. And that's crappy.
Went back to Win7, everything works golden. ???
I'm not touching it. Both PropPlugs work, even the one that never touched the XP machine this time around.
Voodoo. But I'll take it. Now it doesn't take 10 plug, unplug cycles to maybe run code once.
This one problem was a PITA, but I've actually gained a ton working how I do. So no big deal. Once the Mac is sorted, I'll move Prop work to that and be golden for a long time. Been itching to do that for a while now. I did give Linux a spin a while back. After a setup, virtual machine to handle some apps, etc... it just wasn't where I need it to be professionally. BTW, the Mac with Parallels actually is. Runs way better than I would expect. I've got Virtual Box setup on it, and for Prop work, I think that will actually do well.
I do have a live Linux or two that I will boot, from time to time. Stripping passwords from a locked PC, or doing filesystem work / data rescue. Works a treat! But it's just not a daily driver for me for a lot of reasons. And those reasons pay for the toys too. No brainer.
The nice thing is I'm free to move. I'm OS fluent. It's all about time / materials optimization.
It's a bad interaction between the PropPlug FTDI combination and the ASUS Display Link. Set services to manual, and life is good now. I just won't use that secondary USB display and a Prop Plug. This is fine, because I've never dual screened it in that way. Not missing anything I really want to or have to have.
Now I thump on the Mac tomorrow, because that is still the primary P2 target.
I plug in a USB/Serial adapter, any kind not just FTDI. A kernel message announces some error and that it is disabling some interrupt. The adapter works fine. BUT, my mouse has become slow, unresponsive and jerky. The machine is barely usable until the next reboot.
All this on Debian Jessie.This was not a problem under Wheezy on the same machine.
Given the trouble people have with USB on all manner of machines and operating systems I don't blame my Linux. I blame USB itself. Why is USB so crappy?
Try reading some USB specifications. Then you realize why USB is so crappy and never works. Despite having been developed since 1998 or whatever! The specs. are huge tortuous and complex. How could anyone dream up such a complex way to get the simplest thing in the world, a serial port?
Remember when Bill Gates demoed USB to the public on Win 98 for the first time? When he plugged in the cable the machine blue screened immediately! The writing was on the wall. We should have just rejected USB then and there.
And thus concludes my morning rant.
And yes USB is horrible as a protocol. Unbelievably so. It's a miracle anything works at all. But you can kind of see why, when you look at USB host adapters.. even the Ebay ones (if you want to install a controller into your PC because it doesn't have one, or it doesn't have USB 3.0 already) have just recently come down in price. Until last year they cost as much as some of the FPGA development boards. Those USB host controllers are intricate.
I started down the P2 trail on Linux until I found PNUT unable to talk to the P2 when running under Wine. Still haven't been able to make that work so any P2 stuff is now done on Win10.
It's small and easy, though whoever designed the, "have to look at it every single time and still get it wrong" plug deserves a darwin award, or something. (prolly something because civilized, but it's annoying as all get out) Bonehead engineering right there.
So we use the Smile out of it, and it's gotten fast too, but the basis is crappy.
With Windows, I have found that sometimes the device has to be plugged in for quite a while before I can access it.
Secondly, a reboot can help; especially if the COM port / usbtty* was previously used by the device or another device without a reboot.
It is inconvenient to reboot, but it has helped at times.
Hope it helps.