Noel and others,
Some users are seeing intermittent PC Comm Errors with BrainMaster, or sync errors with BioExplorer. These occur even with older 2.5SE software that has been field proven for a long time.
We have found a likely cause of this problem, and a fix for it. To make a long story short, if you get a USB hub, especially a powered one, and insert it between the PC and the Atlantis, this problem should go away.
It only happens on certain PC's. It has nothing to do with the Atlantis hardware itself. We know of it only on PC's with AMD processors. Mine here is an HP with an AMD Turion 64 and NVIDIA graphics. This one fails after about 7-15 minutes, with
the error you are seeing. (We happened to buy this one by "accident"). I saw that the Atlantis appeared to reset, implying
that the PC was disconnecting the power, or making the power supply vary, resetting the device. Inserting a USB hub made the problem go away. I've run for 120 minutes without an error. When I remove the hub, the error comes back within 15 minutes. So inserting the hub does solve it. I believe that the AMD processor and its USB controller, are somehow
providing either noisy, intermittent, or interrupted power, resetting the Atlantis. The hub has a power supply, or at least power
filtering, to alleviate this.
We used a Belkin 4-port hub P42404-C we got for $19.99 a few years ago. Any hub should work, especially if it is powered. I was able to run without errors with the hub connected in both the line-powered (used the wall wart) or bus-powered (powered from the PC) mode. Both worked fine.
So if you are seeing these errors, get a regular USB hub, and plug it into the PC, then plug the Atlantis into the hub. You should have no more of the data errors we are seeing. I was able to see this work on both the 2.5SE and the 3.0 versions of software, so it is not related to the version of the BrainMaster software.
