Vista Notes (as of March 19, 2007)

Microsoft has released their new operating system, called Vista^®.  As with most of their fully new operating system releases, many third party applications and hardware do not yet work correctly 'out of the box' with the new system.

In our case, we have resolved our two known significant and one minor Vista issues.

Issue 1: USB

The most critical issue relates to USB: Our existing USB products are all based on variants of the 'FTDI' series of USB communication chips.  Vista has FTDI drivers preinstalled: unfortunately, the default settings for those drivers are not fully compatible with our products.  Under Vista, however, the default operating system behavior upon seeing a USB device that it thinks it recognizes is to automatically use its internal default drivers, without giving the user a chance to override the settings.  This means that communications with our existing boards may always be adequately reliable.

We have contacted FTDI, and they have provided us with a workaround.  Our new devices which are set up for Vista now have a different USB identification associated with them, which the default Vista drivers will not recognize.  This will permit Vista to go through the "normal" installation process, giving you access to our version of the FTDI drivers.  This workaround is now standard, and is implemented as part of any order from us. 

Please note that our 'USBToTTL' board cannot be updated using this workaround, and therefore will require extra user effort (by going to the Vista "Device Manager" screen) to fully and correctly configure under Vista.

Initially, our drivers will not be digitally signed.  This means that Vista will throw up several extra dialog boxes warning you that they may be unsafe (which is a correct warning to provide): please be assured that our drivers are actually the same as the signed FTDI drivers, except that the initial settings used by the devices get changed to be compatible with our product offerings.

Issue 2: BiStepCom.dll

We have been shipping a trivial ActiveX system called 'BiStepCom.dll', which was written back in 2002.  Some of our documentation in our manuals refers to this ActiveX system along with part of its sample code.

We have not been supporting that system since we released our much more comprehensive "StepperBoard" class library (which includes almost everything that was in the BiStepCom system, plus a very large number of other features). 

It turns out that the BiStepCom ActiveX will always crash Vista.  However, the StepperBoard class system has been tested, and has been shown to fully operate in the Vista environment.  Accordingly, we are not supporting installation of the BiStepCom system onto Vista (actually, our installation application will not even present it as an option).  Our sample code has now been converted over to use of the StepperBoard libraries, with the exception of samples found only in the BiStepCom directory.

Issue 3: Our documentation and example code installation application

 The previously standard documentation and ActiveX installation application, called 'SetUpCD.exe', will install an operational system under Vista.  However, it does not conform to directory, file, and 'start' menu assumptions under Vista, and is not recommended for a new install.

We now have a new installation application, called 'SetUpStepperBoard.exe'  This installation tool correctly installs our code under "Program Files\StepperBoard",.  It also includes a new tool called SetUpStepperBoardExamples.exe, which installs (or reinstalls, if needed) all of our example scripts and sources into your "My Documents\StepperBoard" folder.  We have also simplified the 'start' menu tree to be 'friendly' to Vista: we make extensive use of tool-tips, and we have reduced the number of subfolders that we install under the 'start' button.

All of our manuals have now been updated to explain their new actions under Vista.

If you choose to download and install the above SetUpStepperBoard application, please uninstall your copy of your prior 'UniversalStepper' installation.  They both install the same ActiveX code into different locations, and you would not want to confuse your system!

Summary: We are now supporting Vista

Most of our currently shipping USB based hardware products will work with Vista, but you may have to manually edit the device settings (under the device manager) to force correct behavior out of the drivers for any existing boards already in your possession.  We have a work-around from FTDI that we are implementing on our new boards, which has been fully proven for operation under Vista, XP and Windows 2000. 

We have converted and tested all of our sample scripts to be Vista compatible.  With the exception of the BiStepCom ActiveX system (and scripts found in that directory), all of our software products work under Vista (including such tools as the current version of TestSerialPorts).