Matrix user forums

I had originally installed the ECIO40P Driver and the vista 64 computer recognized and every thing was working correctly I was able to download to the ECIO. Today I installed Flowkit and evey thing went haywire. When I reconnected the ECIO40P Vista asks for the driver and when I point to the Drver subdirectory it returns saying it could not load the driver.

Hello,

how is the ECIO device appearing in device manager? As an unknown device or as something else?

As an Unknown device.

Hi there,

The bad news is that across the board Vista is an absolute "bear" in the way it manages USB devices. I had a Vista OS on my rig for approx one year, in the early stages it was worse than painful with multiple devices as my toy shop expanded.

The slightly good news is that you can work your way round this problem. The solution is to dedicate a USB physical port per device. I simply plugged in as many cables as I had spare USB ports then labelled them one for each device, ie MIAC, ECIO, EB006 programmer, DsPIC. when I changed devices I changed the cable - a little low tech but simple.

I started the process by deleting all,of the Matrix devices via the Hardware device manager , then re booted the machine. It's now in a clean state in terms of USB/Matrix devices. I then plugged the devices in one at a time on the different cables, then loaded the device driver. In most cases it found the driver automatically.

Now for Flowkit, again a little messy, I programmed the device on one cable and debug via flowkit on another. I did have it working on one cable off and on, however it would eventually stop working and would not recognize the programmer device. Hence the single cable approach.

I have moved all of my rigs over to windows 7 since Aug last year and have not had any issues - any device on any port, no problem. The MM tools are solid...

One other thing to check is the power management on the USB device... You can do this via the hardware device manager... Switch it off (apologies to the sensitivities of any green voters out there ). This will eliminate some of the flaky operation, however on Vista it will eventually fail.

Apologies if this appears to be a cumbersome fix/operation. I can say I operated reliably for about a year in this configuration.


See how you go... Come back to me if you have further questions.

All the best

Pete

Pete,
I appreciate you sharing this information. I will definitly try this today. I was up till 2:00 am trying to figure this out. I am in California and so by the time I try your approch several hours will have passed.
In the event the above does not work, is there a directory or directories where I can go and manually uninstall/delete both the Ecio dirvers and the flowkit drivers. (what are the names of the drivers I would be deleting). I can then reboot the computer and re-install the ecio driver via the Matrix installation program and make sure the ECIO is programming( I will mark that usb and cable). Wait a day or two to get my sanity back and try the flowkit in another usb port.

Thankyou,
Rick

Hi rob,

The drivers should be on a CD that was supplied with your hardware... It's directory on the CD is ELSAM2.4... All the drivers for every device are in this directory and sub directories.....

I did not have to delete the drives... Go into the hardware device management and remove the MM USB device.. When you plug the device back in it should find the driver... Failing that use the ELSAM CD to reload...

If you can't find your disk then all drivers are on MM website...It's almost 2am here, if your still stuck I will look up the URL for you tomorrow..

Talk soon

Best

Pete


P.s. I have just had another thought... Try plugging the ECIO into another USB port... Remember to press reset on ECIO... It might just work, saving you the reload trouble... It's worth a try...

Hello Rick,

There are no real sure fire way to delete drivers by manually removing files in a folder, the general way to do it is via the Device manager, try plugging into different USB ports, and allowing the device to be detected then uninstalling it.

Good evening Pete.

I took your approach word for word to reinstalling the ECIO40P driver and it worked the first time. In less than five minutes.
Thank you so much. Thank you David also.
Rick.

Hi Rob,

Your very welcome, and thank you for the feedback. At some point you may wish to consider windows 7... All of the flaky USB behavior will go away... In the mean time you can reasonably operate with this work around.

All the best

Pete