Only one quadrant of lights flickers on grid

Monome
1

I’ve been looking through lines and manuals but I just can’t find out if my grid 64 still works.

When I power it on one quadrant flickers briefly. I haven’t been able to connect to it but that might just be a driver issue that I just can’t figure out how to solve. I was thinking of getting an ansible module and escape the driver issues but I won’t get that if my grid is bust :blush:

I had it working some years ago but I’ve since updated my OS and I know Mac OS updates can break the drivers…

I’ve also changed the USB port as the old one broke when I left the cable in while storing it. That was an error!

Thanks for all your help!

1 Like
2

It’s normal grid behavior for a small “burst” of LEDs to light up when the unit is first plugged in via USB. This lets you know that the grid is connected and receiving power. At 1:13 in this video you can see the small light pattern in the upper left corner the moment the cable is plugged in:

https://vimeo.com/10750067

Can’t speak to the other connectivity/driver issues, but I’d bet your grid still works fine.

1 Like
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Hello @tgk!
Pretty sure that I spoke to you about this on reverb :slight_smile: Welcome to Lines!

One way you could check to see that your grid is being connected/recognized is to…

  • plug your grid to your mac.
  • Open about this mac
  • click the system report button
  • Under the Hardware section find and click USB
  • Look for monome in the list.

mine looks like this:

33%20AM
33%20AM1088×916 148 KB

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Thanks @Justmat! I’ll try the USB test when I get home!

5

Bear in mind that the device showing up in the list of USB devices (or in the USB Prober application) doesn’t guarantee that the drivers are set up properly. I spent a good few hours wrestling with swapping out different FTDI drivers (kernel extensions, each one requiring a restart) until I got grid hotplugging working reliably. If the grid is detected by serialosc when first plugged in, but not after unplugging and replugging, then you probably have more than one conflicting FTDI driver installed.

If this ends up being an issue, there’s some good information in these threads


and I can post my notes from the debugging process too.

2 Likes
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we’re also continuing the serialosc testing/troubleshooting collection journey and have a decent step-by-step for macOS here: https://monome.org/docs/serialosc/setup/. looking forward to adding any info generated here (@barnaby, your notes would be awesome thank you!)

if you do need a repair, please email help@monome.org

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There are a few things I would add to that documentation, as well as one thing which seems to be a mistake — namely, talking about getting a grep result for FTDIKext.kext leading to the deletion of FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext, which are different things, and (in my experience) both need to be removed in order to let AppleUSBFTDI.kext work properly.

Additionally, I think it’s worth mentioning that kexts can also be found in /Library/Extensions (not just /System/Library/Extensions), that “unloading” an extension is different to removing the file completely, and that serialosc devices initially working but then failing after being unplugged whilst still showing up in USB Prober is a symptom of conflicting FTDI drivers which people might not immediately notice and therefore should test for.

If that all sounds reasonable I can write up a pull request to the monome docs to incorporate this info.

2 Likes
8

sounds excellent, thank you!