I have a digirig lite and a digirig regular. I’ve got a windows 11 laptop and an RPi 4 running Fedora 40. I’ve got the USB-C to A adapter that came with the lite and another one from somewhere else.
All combinations work fine except for the digirig lite on the Pi using either adapter. I find that it is not recognized about 80% of the time. After repeated plugging and unplugging, or plugging in the adapter first then the lite to the adapter, eventually it will get recognized. In all cases the Lite’s green light comes on just after a brief flash of red.
By “recognized” I mean via dmesg, lsusb and cm108, and it’s not available to applications such as wsjt, xastir and paracon.
If Digirig Lite is reliably detected on Windows every time then we can rule out hardware as the source of the problem. Is Digirig Mobile correctly detected every time on RPi? Both of these cases fall under “All combinations” in your message, but just wanted to confirm.
Yes, the mobile is detected every time. That’s using the digirig usb-c to c cable with the same 2 adapters to USB A (the digirig and the 3rd party).
It seems like some sort of race condition since the lite works perhaps 20% of the time (estimate 1 out of 5 times).
I wasn’t hopeful anyone would have any ideas. There’s clearly something wrong with my setup but I can’t make any sense of the symptoms.
I searched a little for some way to rescan USB without replugging the lite. It seems like lsusb should do that? It didn’t seem to help. A software workaround would be a nice plan b.
Using a cheap little USB tester, I see my laptop is at 5.10V. The Lite draws 30 mA.
On the Pi, the tester measures 4.91 V. With the Lite plugged in and when it’s not recognized, there’s no current (this device as 10 mA resolution). On the occasions when it is recognized the voltage goes up to 5.04 and the current is 30 mA.
Perhaps the low voltage puts the Lite right the edge of turning on ?
The insufficient voltage could be the factor. If PI has a weak power supply then the voltage can sag during increased demand from the processor. That can explain intermittent nature of the problem.
I use one of these to confirm the normal current consumptions of Digirigs that I test, but it also shows the USB voltage:
Would you expect it to be different (more sensitive to V) comparted to the Mobile v1.9 and v1.10?
I use the 1.9 and 1.10 on a USB-C y-cable and a winkeyer mini - so a Mobile and winkeyer are both on the same USB port. They are recognized “every” time. I’ve used the 1.9 for a long time and it always works. The 1.10 isn’t used primarily on the pi but I plugged/unplugged 6 times and it worked every time (along with the winkeyer).
One more clue. I have a usb-c to usb-c y-splitter (to combine the digirig mobile and winkey mini onto a single port). I imagine it has a tiny usb hub in it.
Plugging the digirig lite into one arm of the splitter and plugging the splitter into the RPi4, the Lite is recognized every time - at least 5 out of 5 times. It works whether I plug/unplug on the Pi side or on the Lite side.
The other arm of the splitter can be open or it can have the winkey mini plugged in - it’s reliable either way.
Measuring the voltage at the Lite, the port is 4.88V before plugging in the lite and then it goes up to 5 volts after being recognized and initialized.
So it seems like maybe it’s not voltage. It does seem like hardware, though. Any thoughts about what might explain this behavior?
Did anything more come of this? I have been running into the very same issue getting the Digirig Lite working with DigiPi on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. I have to repeatedly plug/unplug the Digirig to have it recognized…
I noted that it works when I used a usb-y cable that likely has a tiny usb hub in it.
Thinking about that further, I happen to have a USB-A isolator from digirig. I tried using that and also the digirig light is recognized reliably on the RPi4.
I don’t think it’s a voltage issue. My cheap USB analyzer shows the voltage the same or slightly less going through these 2 devices. But somehow having USB isolation or a hub is making the Lite work on the RPi4.
So I’d recommend the USB-A isolator since it’s relative small. Maybe some other small device in path will resolve the issue as well. Or if you have a reason to utilize a “y” cable, that could be a clean solution as well.