Hi Eric,
Thanks for posting all of this. Just a quick reminder up front that 0.9.9 is an early test build still in active development, and part of the goal is to catch exactly these kinds of issues before a stable release. If you’d rather avoid running into problems like this, it’s always safer to stick with the latest stable version. That said, your feedback here is genuinely helpful and very much appreciated, and I’m sorry you hit these roadblocks.
To start with the DACs: since you’ve been able to arm all four lasers, it looks like the license is activating correctly (was that in 0.9.9?). The red squares next to the DACs indicate a connection issue. This isn’t related to licensing (which only affects arming, not connections), so I suspect the DACs may have entered an error state or hit some kind of network problem. A few things to try:
- Quit Liberation (all versions), reboot, power cycle the DACs, and restart
- Check which network interface is being used - especially if you’ve got both Wi-Fi and Ethernet active
- If the DACs connect fine in 0.9.6 but not 0.9.9, let me know - that could help narrow it down (although I don’t think that code changed, which suggests it could still be permissions-related)
Re the authorisation stuff: I’ve manually de-authorised your activation, so that should help move things forward.
For your information, 0.9.9 uses a new machine ID system I built specifically to avoid problems we’ve seen before on Windows, where system IDs would come through blank unless the app was run as admin. The new system uses hardware identifiers like CPU ID, BIOS serial, motherboard serial, disk serials, and MAC addresses - things that are usually accessible even without admin. This is Windows-specific - macOS doesn’t throw up the same hurdles (of course, lol).
Because of this change, the machine ID in 0.9.9 is different from the one used in 0.9.6. That means the two versions effectively see themselves as running on different machines. If 0.9.6 is still authorised, the new version won’t be able to authorise until that’s cleared. That’s likely what you ran into.
Once you click “Authorise” in 0.9.9, it enters a “WAITING” state - that just means it’s polling more frequently to see if a matching license has been issued. If it doesn’t find one (because the authorisation process failed), it stays stuck. A restart usually resolves it once the license is in place.
It’s not totally clear yet whether the blank ID was being sent by 0.9.6 in non-admin mode, or if something’s going wrong in 0.9.9 too. Since you managed to arm lasers in 0.9.9 (right?), it suggests that version is generating a valid ID - which would mean the issue is on the older version. If that’s the case, great - that’s exactly what the new system was meant to fix. But if 0.9.9 is still sometimes sending a blank ID, then I’ve got more work to do.
The machine ID issue (the one I’ve attempted to fix in 0.9.9) doesn’t affect all machines - I’ve never been able to reproduce it on my own Windows setup, which has made it really hard to track down. I’ve been working somewhat blind trying to fix a permissions-related failure that only seems to appear in the wild. So if you’re up for it, I’d really appreciate it if you could DM me your logs - they’ll help me work out exactly what’s going on.
I know it’s frustrating to set aside time to dig into new features and then hit this kind of stuff. But your feedback is helping me catch edge cases I wouldn’t otherwise see, and that makes things better for everyone - so thank you again for testing this.
Kindest,
Seb