Unable to connect CW-lite to my laptop

1

Hello,

I’m having troubles connecting my CW-lite to my Windows 10 laptop (a 2020 Dell XPS 13). When I plug it in, the blue and red LEDs keep blinking fast and it does not appear in Windows’s Device Manager. It seems to me that the CW-lite is rebooting in a loop.
I’ve tested it on other PCs and it works fine. I was also able to upgrade its firmware using another PC, but this didn’t fix the problem.

Any idea how I can fix this?

2

Does your laptop use USBC ports? We’ve seen issues with USBC adapters in the past: https://github.com/newaetech/chipwhisperer/issues/237. I’d recommend trying some different USB cables.

Alex

3

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately my laptop only has USB type-C ports, so I have to use an adapter.
I have tried four different adapters with no luck. However, all of these adapters work fine when I try to connect the CW-lite to the USB type-C port on my friend’s laptop.

Marco

4

Hi Marco,

Can you try disabling USB low power mode: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-turning-usb-devices? Let me know if that works.

Alex

5

Hi Alex,

Thanks again for your assistance. Sorry for the late reply, I had trouble disabling that option because it wasn’t showing up on my Windows 10 (I’m starting to hate this laptop). Eventually I was able to restore it via regedit, but disabling it didn’t fix the problem.

Marco

6

Hi Marco,

Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a device with a USBC port at the office, so we haven’t really been able to replicate the issue on our end. I’ll see if I can get something together

In the meantime, some other stuff you can try:

  1. If you’re not already using a VM (we do have a virtualbox image on our github), try using it instead of natively. I don’t think this will work, but it might be worth a shot.
  2. If you’ve got a Raspberry Pi lying around (really anything that can run Python and Libusb) you can try using that until we’re able to get a permanent fix out. I believe even Android supports libusb and Python, so you might even be able to hack something together there: https://github.com/libusb/libusb/wiki/Android

I’ll let you know if I think of anything else you can try.

Alex

7

Quick update: we’re going to order the USB-C to A adapter that we originally found this issue on to try to reproduce the issue.

8

Hi Alex, thanks for the update.

I have an update myself: just today I was able to connect the CW-lite to my laptop using a classic USB HUB (not type C) as a bridge (the connection I made is laptop -> USBC to USB adapter -> classic USB HUB -> CW-lite). I don’t know why, but this way it works. Direct compatibility would be preferable, but this workaround is fine anyway.
Also, I tried to establish a direct connection using the virtual machine, but it didn’t work.

Marco

9

Good to hear you got it working! I think we found in the past that USB-C hubs actually worked fine, but there were issues with adapters. We’ve got a theory that might explain why hubs are okay but straight adapters aren’t, but we still need to replicate on our end to see if that’s the actual reason.

Alex