Other Parts Discussed in Thread: CLOCKPRO, , TICSPRO-SW
Hello,
I support the clocks and timing products, including the devices supported by an old application called ClockPro. We inherited ClockPro from another team that has since been dissolved, and the source code is missing. One of the devices supported by ClockPro is a USB-based EEPROM programmer, that uses the TUSB3410 to interface with the host PC.
Recently, several of our customers have complained to us that ClockPro does not recognize the EEPROM programming board, because the TUSB3410 driver that gets referenced upon plugging in the board is out of date. I'm not very knowledgeable about the process of providing drivers for software packages, but I do see that the ClockPro software includes drivers as part of the installation folder.
Q1: It seems our software is providing an outdated driver and is no longer working properly as a result. Do we need to bundle the up-to-date driver with the installer to prevent this from happening by default? If yes, without the source code in hand, it is impossible for us to make a new version with the correct drivers bundled - but getting agreement from the interface team on the pickle we're in will help to make an argument to invest time in integrating the ClockPro devices into our modern software (TICSPRO-SW).
Q2: Is it possible, without administrative privilege, to overwrite the old version of the TUSB3410 driver installed by ClockPro, and install the up-to-date driver? Our customers must be able to follow this procedure, and if the procedure is gated behind administrative access, there's a good chance they'll be unable to follow it. (It remains to be verified whether the up-to-date driver works with ClockPro, but there's no point in even checking if our customers can't update the driver.)
Q3: Is there some default Windows driver registry that has an up-to-date copy of the driver, which we could instruct customers to point to without administrative privilege? Similar to above, but without requiring the customer to download new software - maybe built-in Windows mechanisms can update with less privileges than manual update? I know there's some simple devices like keyboards which don't require separate driver installations, but I don't know enough about drivers to say whether this is due to some special abstraction built for standard devices, or if the common peripheral vendors are providing pre-load driver bundles for distribution with Windows, or something else like that.
Thanks and Regards,
