Troubleshooting
The step card says what it is waiting for. These are the cases that come up most, with what to do.
The meter is not found
- Try another USB cable and port. Many cheap cables carry power only.
- On Windows, check that the CH340 port appears in Device Manager. If it does not, install the CH340 driver from the bridge maker and plug the meter in again.
- Close any other program that has the port open, such as a terminal or the meter maker’s own software. A serial port can only be open once.
- If the port is there and the meter stays silent, power the meter off and on. The XDM ignores a reset command, so a power cycle is the only reset.
“Set the meter to Diode” and the reading is refused
Every step asks for one mode and the app refuses a reading whose mode flag does not match. On an XDM the app sets the mode itself; if the meter keeps reporting another mode, it has not moved, and the stream stays shut until it does. On a dial meter, turn the dial to the mode the card names.
The step is blocked
A voltage step with the charger or the battery in circuit waits for you to confirm the power state on the card, and a step with a warning waits for you to read it. That is the safety rule: no live reading until you have said the board is in the state the step needs.
The reading never settles
Auto-capture needs three readings that agree within half a percent, or within one meter digit near zero. A probe that is not making contact drifts; so does a rail that is oscillating. Hold the probes still for a second, or tap Capture to take the reading as it is. A reading captured before it settled does not advance on its own; tap Next when you are happy with it.
Working offline
The viewer, the fault trees, cached board profiles, readings and voice commands work with no connection. Readings are written to the local database before they are shown as saved, and the session syncs when the connection comes back. Similar-case recall and chat need a connection; the tree keeps going without them.
A session has not synced
Open the session list: a session waiting to sync shows the count of events still queued. Sync is append-only and safe to retry; nothing is lost by sending the same batch twice. If the queue does not drain, check status.nextprobe.ai and then your workspace’s activation (a bench that has been offline for more than 14 days has to check in before it syncs).
The board file will not open
The format is detected from the bytes, not the extension, so a BVR saved as .brd opens like any other. Files the app cannot read say why: an Allegro binary (export to a text format instead), an Altium ASCII file, an encrypted FZ without its key, or a BV database. Your file never leaves the machine either way.
Something else
Email hello@nextprobe.ai. Logs on the bench app never contain your board files or customer details, so attaching them is safe.