ANT Forum

I obtained an ANT development kit at the Embedded Systems Conference and I'm having trouble getting AntWare to talk to the USB stick.

I installed the USB driver, connected the ANTAP1M51B module to the USB stick, and plugged that into my PC. I launched ANTware, then chose USB Port 0, Baud Rate 50000. When I hit connect port 0 I get "Ant Initialization failed"      

Usually the "Ant Initialization failed" means that the connection to ANT failed. Are the DSI dlls (DSI_SiUSBXp_3_1.dll and DSI_CP210xManufacturing_3_1.dll) located in the same directory as ANTware?

Is the ANT USB stick recognized by your computer? If it is being recognized, it should show up on the Windows Device Manager (Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager) under Universal Serial Bus controllers as "ANT USB Device" or "ANT USB Stick".      

The USB stick is recognized by my computer. It shows up under Ports (COM & LPT) as:
CP210x USB to UART Bridge Controller (COM7)

It shows up under Universal Serial Bus controllers as:
CP210xUSB Composite Device

In the ANTPACK/PC Tools folder I have:

ANT_DLL.dll
ANT_ESC_Demo.exe
ANTware.exe
Device0.txt
readme.txt
SensRware.exe
SiUSB.dll
SiUSBXp.dll
/SensRcore Sample Scripts      

That does not sound quite right. It seems other drivers are conflicting with the ANT drivers. You should see it recognized as either "ANT USB stick" or "ANT USB device".

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers yet? Please get the latest drivers from the downloads area of our website; you can find the instructions for uninstalling the old drivers here. There is also a more up to date version of ANTware in the DevZone.      

I followed the instructions to uninstall drivers. In step 5 I couldn't find any of the files mentioned:

5. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\drivers and erase the file SiLib.sys and SiUSBXp.sys and DSI_SiUSBXp_3_1.sys. Depending on the version of the driver you have installed, your system may not contain all of these files.

In step 6:

Continuing in Windows Explorer, navigate to c:\\windows\\inf (note: this may be a hidden folder on your system). There will be a batch of files in there named oemXX.inf, where the XX is some number (for example oem12.inf). The number of these files and the specific number associated with each one will depend on your system. For example, the figure below shows all the oemXX.inf files highlighted on a computer:

...I found a couple higher numbered oemXX.inf files that referenced Silicon Labs and I deleted them all.

After installing the new driver, it still shows up in Device Manager as "CP210x USB Composite Device" and I still get "Ant Initialization failed" in the new version of ANTware.exe.

If I look at the properties of this device I see that the driver provider is Silicon Labs and the individual driver files are:
c:/windows/system32/drivers/slabbus.sys (v4.28, provider MCCI)
c:/windows/system32/drivers/slabwh.sys (v4.28, provider MCCI)
c:/windows/system32/drivers/slabwhnt.sys (v4.28, provider MCCI)
c:/windows/system32/slabunin.2k (v unknown, provider unknown)
c:/windows/system32/slabunin2k.exe (5.1.2600.0 built by WinDDK, provider Windows 2000 DDK Provider)

...do one or more of these need to be deleted in step 5 above?      

I am surprised that none of the files from Step 5 appeared in your system, since you mentioned you had installed the drivers before. How did you install the drivers? After using the provided installer, when you plug in the ANT USB stick, Windows should detect it as a new device, and you should select the correct location where the drivers were installed when prompted by the Add Hardware Windows wizard.

If using the latest drivers (the ones on our website), the individual driver files are
C:\\Windows\\System32\\Drivers\\DSI_SiUSBXp_3_1.sys
C:\\Windows\\System32\\Drivers\\SiLib.sys
The driver provider is Silicon Laboratories, however, the driver files are quite different than what you see in your computer. Are these files anywhere on your system?

It seems you have other drivers from SiLabs that are conflicting with ANT's. If you know which device these drivers belong to, you might be able to uninstall the conflicting drivers. Have you tried a different computer?