Piksi® Multi provides a USB device connection, which presents 2 serial ports to the host system. When using the Piksi Multi Evaluation Board, this USB device connection is accessible via the micro-USB port. Swift Navigation provides a Windows driver for these devices. No driver is currently required or provided for use on Mac OS or Linux operating systems. This article outlines the steps to install the Windows USB driver and verify device connectivity.
Driver Download
The current USB driver can be downloaded from the Swift Navigation Support Portal:
From this page, use the link found in the USB Drivers for Piksi Multi section to download the driver. The driver itself is packaged as a zip file. Extract the contents of this zip to an easy to remember location on your computer. When installing the drivers, you will need to reference this location.
Driver Installation
- Connect Piksi Multi to the computer via USB
- Upon connecting, if the Found New Hardware Wizard is started, click Next and accept the defaults
- Upon connecting, if the Found New Hardware Wizard is started, click Next and accept the defaults
- Open Device Manager
- In the COM and LPT Ports or Other Devices section - you should see 2 CDC Serial devices
- Right-click the first device, and select Update Driver
- On the next window, select Browse My Computer for Driver Software
- Click the Browse button, and locate the directory containing the files extracted from the zip
- Click Next
- Click Install on the next dialog box
- Repeat this process for the second device
- Both devices should now appear in Device Manager with their drivers properly installed
- In the COM and LPT Ports or Other Devices section - you should see 2 CDC Serial devices
Driver Verification
Upon completion of the driver installation - make note of which COM port correlates to which device. In the example above, COM3 is the Swift Navigation GNSS Receiver and COM4 is the Swift Navigation GNSS Receiver Linux Shell. The Linux Shell port provides access to the device’s on-board Linux environment. It can be accessed using a terminal emulator program such as Putty or TeraTerm.
The GNSS Receiver port provides access to the device in a manner similar to the on-board serial and ethernet ports. It can be configured to use different protocols, but by default is set up for SBP. If you have not changed this configuration, you should now be able to connect to the device using Swift Console at the corresponding COM port.
Troubleshooting
It has been noted that in some rare occasions only one serial port is installed instead of two on a Windows machine. Investigation indicated Windows driver issue. If it happens please uninstall and remove Swift drivers from that PC and then install them again. Follow steps described below to uninstall Swift drivers on a Windows 7 PC:
- Ensure that you can see all hidden devices
- Click Start > Run
- Type cmd.exe in the textbox and click OK
- Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and hit ENTER.
- Type cd\windows\system32 and hit ENTER.
- Type start devmgmt.msc and hit ENTER.
- When the Device Manager opens, click the View menu.
- Click Show Hidden Devices.
- Open the device manager and find all the Swift COM port device under Ports (COM & LPT)
- Right click on the Swift COM port and select "Uninstall driver" (make sure to check the box that says "Delete the driver software for this device").
- Repeat step 3 on all Swift ports
- Disconnect the Piksi and reboot the Windows 7 machine
- After reboot, re-attach the Piksi and re-install the drivers