My STL camera won't power up when connected to a Mac (OS High Sierra v. 10.13.6) -- no lights and no fan. I shipped it to the SBIG shop where it checked out perfectly, so at this point I would appear to have a software problem. The latest driver package (4r84) has been reinstalled (it was installed before, but just in case ...). When power is applied, the camera shows up in the USB list using "system_profiler SPUSBDataType", with product ID 2 and vendor ID 0x0d97 (= 3479). However, the vendor ID does not list an identification string in parentheses following the vendor ID number, unlike all of the other USB devices on the system. This would appear to me to indicate that the Mac's USB subsystem cannot find the SBIG information. How do I verify that the installation has been properly completed (i. e., where are the installed files supposed to be and what should they contain)? I see SBIGUSBEDriver.kext and SBIGUSBLoader.kext in /System/Library/Extensions, but the driver extension appears to contain version 4.70 instead of 4.84, judging by the Info.plist file, and the plist file contains no entry for product ID 2. I'd appreciate any troubleshooting information you can provide.
After 3 weeks without even an acknowledgement, and after finding out that this has apparently been an ongoing problem for almost 5 years now, and after spending a couple of hundred dollars plus shipping to find out that there is nothing wrong with my camera, I'm having a rather difficult time suppressing my desire to rant. Some research suggested that the problem was that the SBIG drivers are not "signed" by Apple; however, disabling the Mac's System Integrity Protection feature did not resolve the problem. Further research turned up some indications that disabling SIP used to work, but doesn't work in the latest MacOS releases. At this point, what I need is a few minutes of guidance to try to troubleshoot the magical undocumented driver software package SBIG had me install on my Mac. Please give me just a little bit of help (or at least tell me that it doesn't work, cannot be made to work, or you've stopped trying to make it work). OK, just to assuage my feelings a bit, I'll rant a tiny amount. After many years of working at the hardware/software boundary in the computer and peripherals world, I'm not surprised by seeing yet another company that makes excellent hardware grossly neglect their associated software. I continue to be mystified by such companies that *give away* the software without premium, yet remain secretive about that software, with binary-only releases and no provided documentation (save for an end-user API). There's more to say, but I'll stop here ...
Sorry for the delay in the response — this fell through the cracks. The reason your camera isn't powering up is because the Kernel Extension responsible for being the bootloader of older cameras (including your STL-11k) in Mac OSX has been experiencing a high volume of deprecations that we haven't been able to deal with yet. No firmware = no leds/fans. We have an updated SBIGUDrv library, which we've tested and distributed to testers; but we've had no success loading the kernel extensions, and limited success determining why. We devote time to the problem periodically, but it's proven to be more difficult than we anticipated. We're investigating another solution that would circumnavigate kexts altogether, but we're not in a state where we can comment on a timeline for that. A known work-around is to connect the camera to a windows PC with the appropriate drivers so the windows bootloader can upload the required firmware, then (without powering down the camera) connecting it to your OSX computer (straight USB transfer). SBIGUDrv will then be able to find it and operate.
This problem has been ongoing for literally *years* -- isn't it long past time to contract someone to fix it?
This issue affects some obsolete models, which load their firmware from the computer. Modern cameras store their firmware in the built-in flash memory.
