USB Hub issues and diagnose, It's "almost" working.

[RoberMC]

Hello, first congratulations for this amazing device and your great work, I got it yesterday and I am having Issues with a pretty common USB HUB, Here's what I observed and I hope my findings help making it more stable.

The USB HUB is based on the Terminus FE2.1 chip (USB2.0, 7 ports)
HIDMAN Firmware 1.1.6

• When the HUB is connected the remaining native hidman port starts behaving erratically, it skips key presses or repeat keys randomly
• Devices connected to the HUB do not work, nothing is registered, blue light does not blink.
• Enter the Menu - Advanced - Log HID Data, do a Rescan.
• After the rescan completes everything connected to the HUB start working 100% perfectly while the native HIDMAN port keeps behaving erratically
• If the HUB is unplugged the native port starts to work fine again.
• If you plug again the HUB, there's 80% chance devices connected to it will not be recognized, after a rescan they will be detected again.
• Native Hidman USB ports will never work fine as long as the hub is connected to the other port.

The devices I have connected are:
HIDMAN USB1: Noname USB mechanical Keyboard
HIDMAN USB2: FE2.1 HUB ---> Logitech Unifying Receiver (Logitech K400 Plus keybd+trackpad)

I attached the log when doing a rescan and the devices on the hub pass from not being recognized to be recognized.

I hope this information is helpful, thank you for the hard work you put into this.

EDIT: If the computer is turned on with no device connected to the native USB and all devices connected to HUB they are detected at boot and work wonderfully.

HIDMAN_LOG1.TXT

[rasteri]

v1.1.7 beta has rewritten hub support, perhaps that will help : https://github.com/rasteri/HIDman/releases/tag/v1.1.7beta1

[jarpatus]

Anything I could do to help making chained USB hub support better? I just tried v1.1.7 beta, but no luck with chained hubs. My setup is Dell U3821DW display with KVM. If I connect keyboard directly to monitor's internal USB hub, it works. But sadly my easy to access USB port is broken and rest USB connectors are hard to access, so I have added just a normal unpowered Anker hub to my display -> but hidman does not see my keyboard after this chain...

[jarpatus]

Interestingly enough, I managed to get chained hubs to ALMOST work when I connect my final hub to certain port on my Dell display (sadly, broken one, it sometimes is fiddly as connector is physically broken). But not fully, it works for few seconds, after led on hub blinks, devices are disconnected and soon after it works again.

When connected like this, it almost works, when connected in any other way it does not:

Edit: Right, now this might be actually at least partly problem with Dell's KVM. First of all, I just realized I had webcam plugged into KVM as well. I unplugged webcam and wham, now my setup works with hidman. Furthermore, now USB port I thought was broken, actually works stable with hidman and with Windows 11 as well. So when I had webcam plugged to port 3, port 4 started to act up. Webcam in port 1 or 2 wokrs fine, also works fine if webcam is plugged to hub connected to port 4 (or 3). Hub is unpowered at the moment so don't think it is a power issue... So Dell KVM really is fiddly.

But hidman won't work perfectly either. It won't work in port 1 or 2 at all and in ports 3 or 4 only my Axagon hub works, not Anker hub. Uh, I did not knew USB enumeration is such a nightmare...

[rasteri]

If you could get me a HID log of you plugging the hubs into hidman that'd be great.

[jarpatus]

Tried and failed... I am using hidman-micro variant with only single USB-port so I cannot use menu if USB-hub and hence keyboard does not work :-)

But I played enough with the setup and I think we could conclude there is something seriously wrong with Dell's KVM as it acts up under Windows too (works in Linux though) so I dunno, not worth trying to fix it in hidman....

[rasteri]

Oh - hidman micro is based on older HIDman hardware, which doesn't have an oscillator on it. It will have unavoidable problems with hubs I'm afraid.

It's possible the full hidman will work on your setup, or micro might if it was modified to have an oscillator on it