We started to have reports this week about Macs not connecting with people’s new machines. This issue was hard to track down: many people who had their X-Carve for a while seemed to be connecting fine, so it did not seem to be a bug in the Easel code. Based on how sudden the onset of the problem, and the fact that there were no code updates to this part of Easel recently, the only other culprit was the Arduino itself. However, the users affected were all able to connect to their machines using other software.
It turned out that there was an update recently to the way that the Arduinos were identifying themselves. Easel didn’t know about this and kept searching for the old style of Arduino ID.
We updated Easel a few minutes ago so that it will recognize the new Arduinos. Please refresh the page and you should be able to connect.
Thank you to everyone who reported issues and patiently helped us identify the problem. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but instead of just apologies I want you to know what we are doing now to prevent this problem.
We use an internal process called Root cause analysis to trace problems back beyond their immediate cause, back to the process that led to the error. I started a root cause analysis on this issue because it has to do with manufacturing, sourcing, fulfillment and development. The immediate corrective action has already been taken: we deployed a fix for Easel to allow it to recognize the new Arduinos (hooray web based software!). But now we have to figure out where this change occured, and modify / create a process so that it does not happen again. I’ll update this post with our findings.
Side note: this is not the same as the connection issues related to using the beta of El Capitan. That is being solved separately and will be fixed by the time the general release is available to the public.