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Ok, so, I recently bought a used Mac Mini to replace my Raspberry Pi as a shop computer. This is great because now I can run Easel natively and carve directly from it instead of using a Gcode sender.
But! Easel is acting kind of funky on it. I’m trying to narrow down what could be causing it, but I’m not sure where to start. Every once in a while my artwork will randomly disappear. It’s like Keyser Soze.
It doesn’t seem to be a mis-key from the wireless keyboard, and I don’t even know what key or combination thereof could cause it to clear all the artwork without first selecting it anyway. But it does allow me to “undo” and get my artwork back, as long as I don’t close it first.
This only happens on the Mac Mini, which is one of 3 Macs I use Easel with. But, it’s also the only one the Arduino is actually connected to.
I’ve also noticed that the Mini won’t restart at all if the Arduino is connected to it. I have to unplug it or else I get a solid grey screen on restart. No progress bar, no apple logo, just a solid grey screen.
This has been happening since the first time I fired up Easel on that Mac, and continues to happen intermittently. It’s not a show-stopper but it’s annoying. I’m not sure if it’s a bug in Easel, in my Mac, or somewhere else.
For reference here are my 3 systems:
27" iMac 2011, 3.4ghz i7, 16gb ram, OSX 10.11.2
15" MacBook Pro 2009, 2.66 c2d, 8gb ram, OSX 10.11.2
Mac Mini 2010, 2.4ghz c2d, 4gb ram, OSX 10.11.2
It could just be dust in my keyboard, but I don’t see anything untoward when I have the Keyboard Viewer app open while the anomaly happens. If it were an errant wireless signal causing a mis-key or a non-key then I should still see it if the system registers it happening, right?
It may be worth noting that it doesn’t seem to happen when I “screen share” into the machine from another computer.
Turns out my wireless keyboard, A Logitech K400r, is not technically Mac compatible and so has no software to control it other than the standard Mac preferences.
It also has several features turned on by default. One of which is a set of trackpad gestures (swipe from off-pad to the left or right) which, when invoked, would press either ctrl+bksp or cmd+bksp respectively. I have no idea what the point of that gesture was, but to turn it off I hit Fn+right click.
This can be marked as “solved” by the mods, and/or deleted as seen fit. Thanks for the help everyone!