I think we killed one

So, a student said he can’t get his XRP to program so plugged it into my workstation, sure enough Win11 beeps indicating it is connected, but the device manager shows “Unknown USB Decide (Device Descriptor Request Failed)” under the Universal Serial Bus controllers section.

All the other XRP robots still work like normal, hold boot select, plug in usb, instantly shows up as a drive.

I tried holding boot select, then pressing reset, then releasing boot select because I saw that on the internet but that did nothing.

I took a look at the board with thermal and nothing on the pico W or the XRP board looks unduly hot.

I have to assume the problem is with the pico so I will probably just solder on a new one.

Hi there, sorry to hear you’re having troubles!

I’ve heard of this behavior happening to some other users unfortunately, and it’s not yet clear to me what the root problem is. Could you please submit an RMA with SparkFun? Add a link to this thread so the support folks know I sent you - then I can get my hands on it and take a closer look to hopefully diagnose the root problem.

Thanks!

One thing to try, as i’ve experienced this a couple of times, is turn off the XRP prior to plugging it into the computer. I’ve had a couple times where the XRP seems to get stuck in a certain state and it is unable to connect to the computer. Once it is turned off and then connected, it breaks from that state.

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Yes, this trick works for me, too.

I have kind of done every variation of plug in powered, unpowered, on, off, with accessories plugged in not plugged in, holding the boot sel button, pressing the user button, holding one than the other, etc.

The USB chip on the pi certainly works as the computer recognizes that it is talking to a usb device, it just can’t tell what the device is.

I may just order a replacement for the board or just pull the old pi board and solder in a new one.

It would be nice for the community for Sparkfun to get the board back for analysis to help prevent this problem in the future. Also XRPCode does expect a picoW.