FPGA not found by Open Ephys on Ubuntu Xenial

[Brad Buran]

When I launch Open Ephys (compiled on my computer) and activate the Rhythm FPGA node, I get the following output:

---- Intan Technologies ---- Rhythm RHD2000 Controller v1.41 ----
FrontPanel DLL loaded.  Built: Feb  1 2012  17:34:05
Scanning USB for Opal Kelly devices...
Found 0 Opal Kelly devices connected:
Device could not be opened.  Is one connected?

I have the Front Panel SDK, and the FrontPanel program detects the FPGA just fine. Do I need to do something else to get this working? I was able to connect to the FPGA on a Windows computer running a pre-compiled binary of Open Ephys, but Linux is generally better for development.

Brad

[Brad Buran]

Ok, so there were two problems. First, you need a more recent version of the libokFrontPanel.so that is distributed with the Opal Kelly SDK (attached). Second, you need to make sure that the rhd2000_usb3.bit file is in the same directory as the executable created during the build process (e.g., copy from Resources/Bitfiles to Builds/Linux/build).

Brad

[Aarón Cuevas]

The tested version of FrontPanel for USB3 support on Linux is already present on /Resources/DLLs/Linux-USB3, using different versions can have unexpected consequences. This USB3-capable DLL, however, makes the GUI fail to start on some Linux distributions without modifying the system first. More info about the issue in https://github.com/open-ephys/plugin-GUI/issues/44

This info was in the documentation at some point, but it seems that it got lost in the transition to plugin architecture, I'll add it to the Linux installation page.