USB Saturation!

[RayS]

Long story short, one of my interface cards began exhibiting some issues about 2 months ago.

It is a 64-Output IO card. (Vendor not important here as it's not the card's fault so I'd rather not associate the bad behavior in any way to their product.)

Rather intermittently, and as time went on, rather often and usually on short final would the Output card go crazy.

Me being prone to power problems of the self-induced kind, thought it might be time for yet another power supply as I had added a few more trinkets to the sim.

That would be a big fat NOPE!

After replacing/swapping out nearly every control card in the sim and re-wiring about 20% of what is in that rat's nest, I threw up my hands and yelled at it; "I GOT NUTHIN!"

Finally resorting to shotgun troubleshooting, I noticed something odd on a USB ports so I sat... and waited.. and watched... and watched some more. Turns out one USB port data lights would flicker during these odd events.

I immediately unplugged the USB cable from the card controlling the Flight Illusion radios and viola! I had found my culprit! It was the FI card being a bit too chatty.

Recently I had removed 2 Flight Illusion radios and added 4 more, and thought nothing further of the matter.

That was it.. the addition of 2 more radios was enough to send USB traffic that would saturate the USB pipe.

Adding another computer and giving the FI USB controller it's own system has finally resolved the issue.

I really love this hobby, but sometimes I really really hate it. :-)

[kurt-olsson]

Uuhhh that seemed tricky! Glad you solved it! Usb ports can be a nightmare.
I hope my system will be able to handle like 50 teensies usb port when complete! Hehe

[gjha97]

It would be really nice if there was some software that could monitor the USB bus for just this issue.  Its probably out there and we just don't know about it. Anybody know of a USB saturation monitor that can be obtained reasonable easily? 

[RayS]

I used this tool to help troubleshoot my USB issues...

http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml