Expansion board 3 firmware update Zadig issues

[andyc]

Hi,

I'm hoping that someone might be able to help provide a solution to a problem that I'm having updating the expansion board 3 firmware. I've only just bought the pycom kit (wipy, gpy and expansion board) and seem to be falling at the first hurdle in getting up and running.

I'm following the instructions here : https://docs.pycom.io/pytrackpysense/installation/firmware#using-dfu-util-with-pytrack-pysense-and-expansion-board-v3

I'm running Windows 10 and have downloaded Zadig 2.4, as per the instructions. When I connect the expansion board, I can see it appear correctly, both in device manager and also in Zadig. I can do this both for normal mode and DFU mode and see it enumerate as "Expansion3" or "Unknown Device #1" respectively with device IDs matching those in the documentation.

The problem comes when I try to install the driver for DFU mode, as Zadig is taking more than the 7 seconds available (the time before the expansion board switches out of DFU mode) to create the catalog file, which means that by the time it starts installing, the device is no longer there and the installation fails.

If you disable "Create a Catalogue File" in Zadig, then it is fast enough, but fails with "Requested resource not found". The log indicates this is due to "Driver package INF file hash is not present in catalog file." which seemed logic, given that I disabled it! Likewise, disabling signing also speeds it up, but fails due to certificate validation, which again is not surprising.

I'm running this on a laptop with a 7th generation i7 and SSD; so it's not an especially slow machine. I did see a forum post suggesting that Zadig could be slowed down by Windows policies preventing it from disabling system restore point creation, but I checked the policy settings and they looked fine.

Any ideas would be most gratefully received!

Many thanks,
Andy

[Paul Thornton]

I've had Zadig be a bit fiddly in terms of getting the timing right. Ive not seen it take that long just to build a catalog. certainly not on decent hardware.

On my laptop:

i7 6700k, generic sdd. it was basically instant.
are you seeing high cpu/io usage during those few seconds? (Admittedly it'll be hard to diagnose given the few seconds of time constraint..)

[dispatj]

Hi I am having the exact same issues, I am going to have to resort to installing a linux distro on a partition in order to proceed here.

[andyc]

By way of a follow-up for anyone else with the same issue, I worked around this by using Linux to update the expansion board firmware before switching back to Windows to continue development.