Some RB-x30 devices not recognized by Windows or MacOS

Hardware
1

I’m having some troubles installing RB-530 response pads. I’m following the instructions both from Cedrus and from FTDI’s site for adding the USB driver.

I have one response pad that works just fine after the installation and two that don’t.

I’ve installed the driver on a Windows 10 machine, and two MacOS machines (10.15 and 11.6.2).

On all three systems, I’m seeing the same problem. One of them works fine on all three systems, the other two are detected but aren’t seen by the Xidon 2 app or Psychopy.

For the working response pad on the Macs. The device is seen as a USB <-> Serial device and on the Windows machine it shows in device manager under COM devices. That looks good and this response pad works.

The two that don’t work, show up on the Mac as a RB-x30 Response Pads. On the Windows machine, it also shows up as RB-x530 Response Pad but says there’s no available driver. Even though these device models are correctly recognized, it doesn’t seem to be using the USB/Serial driver I installed.

One other thing I’ve noticed about the response pads, the working device has a product ID of 0x6001. Both of the non-working devices have a product ID of 0xf228. That’s the only difference I can seem to find between the three response pads.

I’m not sure if a couple of them may need a firmware update but it doesn’t appear that one exists from Cedrus.

Does anyone have any ideas why two of the response pads are recognized differently on both Windows and MacOS?

2

The two response pads that are not working are probably pre-June 2011. They need to be reconfigured; see the page Reconfiguring RB Series Response Pads.

As you correctly noted, the difference is in the product ID. This tells Windows which USB driver to use. All the reconfiguration process does is change that product ID – it does not affect the firmware.

3

Thanks for the response Hisham. I’d like to give that a shot. Is it still the case though that reconfiguring them can only be done from a 32-bit Windows XP machine?

4

I’m afraid so, the FTDI software requires it. If you don’t have one of those old PCs around, you are welcome to send us the two response pads and we’ll do it for you over here. The service is free, you cover the round trip shipping.

After that, your trusty RB-530s will be good for another 10 years.
:grinning:

5

Wow thanks Hisham! I appreciate that. I’m fortunate to have a bunch of old hardware lying around so I think I can cobble an XP machine together :slight_smile:

I’ll give things a shot first but I may take you up on that in the end.

6

That’s good. We actually do not have an XP machine around. But we keep a Parallels virtual machine that uses Windows XP. It’s easier to “keep it alive” than a real XP machine.