Not sure where to go with this… @Rick you seem to have solved a few issues with these boards, any idea?
My previous board (LMCV4-FIBER-M) was determined to be dead by StyleCNC, so I bought a new FBLI-B-LV4 from Cloudray after plenty of research suggested it’s a lightburn compatible board.
Now, when I plug it in it shows up in device manager as a Generic USB Hub instead of a laser control board of any description. Not sure where to go from here. I’ve also reached out to Cloudray, but who knows… they’ll probably just tell me to install a driver and not provide a driver.
Which also leads to the question: What driver do I need? I can’t get any action from EzCad or Lightburn with the drivers I used before, and the few links here I’ve found to a possible driver are all dead links or the file was removed. I found one old google drive link that seems to be the same driver I have.
That’s actually the driver I managed to find (from that thread). The issue is that no matter what driver I try to install windows will only see the board as a generic USB hub and will not overwrite the existing driver it determined is “correct”.
I’ve got a message on the cloudray support forum, but I’m honestly not expecting much. Previous interactions suggest much gets lost in translation.
Trying to force windows to replace the driver with zadig just breaks all my actual USB ports.
Not sure if/how I can convince Windows to see a specific hardware ID as what it is, and not what windows thinks it is.
The USB device, when connected, sends what’s called a VID/PID pair (Vendor ID / Product ID), which are just numbers, to the operating system. These numbers uniquely identify the manufacturer and the device type (IE, vendor and product) and it’s how Windows matches it to the proper driver.
If your device is incorrectly sending a generic ID that means “I’m a USB hub” that would cause all kinds of weirdness for sure.
When you plug it in, what do you see in the Windows Device Manager for it? In the “Properties” pages, you should be able to find the reported VID/PID numbers (they’ll look something like 976B / 0882). Can you find those and tell us what they are? A lot of it will look like gobbledygook, but they should be labeled VID / PID or Vendor / Product or something very similar.
Correct, it’s on a port on the back of the motherboard. (Port_#0007.Hub_#0001
) I’ve tried it on every other port, and in a port on a USB C hub, and on a laptop…
VID_1A40&PID_0101 would be a “Terminus Technology” USB Hub: USB\VID_1A40&PID_0101 - Hub | Device Hunt
Are you sure, this is the device that disappears when you unplug the board?
The USB peripheral controller on your board does some fancy device ID enumeration during the power-up sequence. (Page 7 on the datasheet) Did you already plug in the scanhead and laser source to the board or the USB only? Not sure, if it makes a difference.
Yeah, that’s what comes up for that VID - as soon as I get back into my office I’m going to look at the chips on the board and see what’s going on - if I see that name I’ll know something - not worth much, but something.
USBView shows the device correctly mapped to the port ID, I am 100% sure it’s the correct device.
but i have an idea… these “new” boards have an integrated dongle, and I suspect that maybe the board itself is a hub with 2 or more devices attached to that hub - for some reason the hub will connect but not connect to the other onboard devices - could be a bad board I suppose, could be power related, I don’t see any physical jumpers on the pics of the board but could be something I’m just not seeing… no response from Cloudray as yet, but did ask if the board’s USB chip is manufactured by Terminus (I may have to ask CJZ). Like, did I get a board with the wrong USB chip on it? I have yet another board shipping to me, on the off chance it’s just a one off board.
Oddly the board shows up as hub on 2 of my 4 laptop USB ports, and the other 2 it won’t show up at all…
I’m hooked, this is a real project now, I will not stop until this thing works!
Turns out a few things were going on that are pitfalls of buying a used laser on Facebook Marketplace for $500.
First, the 5v PSU was dead. The USB from my PC and half my laptop would self power the hub, but would not deliver power to the attached accessory (the controller board).
Once I got that sorted, and had a solid 5V to the board, I could get Lightburn to ID the board, but nothing else would work…
Previous owned did their own work to upgrade to a rotary axis and in doing so made a complete mess of the DB15 connector, putting things on the wrong pins (from what I could tell, they misread the pinout diagram doing everything backwards - so I had every pin in the wrong spot. Glad I learned to solder as a kid!
Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have harmed the new board, and I suspect the old board is perfectly fine, and it’s time for some returns or resale. Now I only have power output issues, I’ll start a new post perhaps.
Apologies that I’m just now catching up, but it looks like the VID/PID thing at least gave a clue as to what was happening. Happy to hear you figured it out!
