hi @SPIKE,
first i should say that i’m not one of the people who uses lots of USB controllers with norns. 1 at most. i also don’t have access to an arc, and so, though i am a primary developer of the norns stack, the part where external devices are managed has gone through a lot of evolutions and im no longer intimately familiar with every part of it.
but we have certainly been paying attention to your reports, i just don’t think we’ve had much success reproducing them, and often i personally find it hard to parse what the direct symptom is.
e.g. here i assume that “not connecting properly” means that after starting up or RESETing, the current script doesn’t interact with connected devices as expected. so it would be great to know what script that is. the problem could be really simple, like: the script is hardcoded to use the first listed device of a given type (like a grid), and we can’t guarantee enumeration order. so we introduced the “vport” system, but this is newer and some scripts don’t use it so they may need to be updated.
echoing a comment the above, i would say using grid+arc is a common use case - though again, one which i can’t test - and we should go through eliminating less-known factors. the main one is
that’s a pretty unusual device, which sends and receives a lot of data and has a pretty respectable current draw when bus-powered (300mA according to the manual.) i think it’s also quite a straightforward device in that AFAICT it is “plain MIDI” and doesn’t enumerate a HID or mass storage device (or something) as well.
but i agree that a first question is definitely about current draw. all three of those are power hungry machines. if we can’t deliver enough current to the USB ports, on of them could be soft-resetting (or soemthing) and thus constantly confusing the device->vport mapping layer in various ways. (e.g. if i repeatedly soft-reset a DIY midi controller here, i can get any ALSA linux system to bork itself eventually, by enumerating a new device before the first one is gone - presumably a race condition of some kind.)
since you seem to use a lot of high-end gear and a lot of USB controllers, i think it’s worth picking up a simple USB current meter. these are inexpensive, and will eliminate some guesswork. brownouts are bad for digital electronics. if you have one of these, you can put it in front of a hub and meaure the comibned draw of UC44+grid+arc with the leds lit, and this will be a good number to have on hand when planning a controller setup, regardless of the host hardware.
eh, i see you updated above that there are issues with grid+arc as well. we just need to reproduce this- in fact someone at the factory does, since i don’t have needed devices here. we don’t need a lot of detail but just: what script are you using, or combination thereof, and what is the symptom of “not connecting.”
also i’m gathering that you haven’t run into issues with only a single device connected, is that accurate?
