ANT Forum

This is one of those sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't problems.

My application runs on XP, Vista, and as far as I knew on Win7 (until my Win7 system was stolen) and on Win8.

It runs on my associates WIn8 system, no problem.

It will not run on my Win8 system. My ap reports that the stick is "busy" even though nothing else is attempting to use it (no Garmin agent, no poweragent). The system reports the ANT USB stick as present, driver installed and working.

A user has reported the same problem that I am seeing on Win 8 on his Win7 machine.

I'm using:

antstick = New ANT_Managed_Library.ANT_Device()

as my test to validate that my ap can talk to the ANT stick.

Any advice greatly appreciated - thanks Rob

     

Hi,

Is the ANT Stick plugged directly to a port in the computer, or through a USB Hub?      

Directly plugged in but I can answer my own question after a little bit of digging.

Looks like what happens is that when you plug the stick into a Win 8 system (and quite possibly newer / updated Win 7 systems) it either activates a pre-installed Garmin ANT Utility or it downloads one with the driver.

What I found was that there was a Garmin ANT Agent in the start-up list. Mind you, I only found this after I had found the Garmin Agent in the task manager list and deleted it and then re-booted to make sure, only to find I still had the same issue with the stick and the Garmin ANT Agent was back in the task list.

I'd like to know the ins and outs of why this happens because it seems a bit cheeky to me to assume that just because somebody installs an ANT stick on a Windows system that they want to run Garmin ANT Agent, without any warning that that is going to happen, and therefore block third party applications.      

Garmin ANT Agent is co-installed with several other Garmin Software.
It autostarts with Windows and monopolizes the stick.
So you should either uninstall it, or close it (you find it in the Windows Tasbar Tray) after rebooting Windows.
For some while Garmin have been replacing the ANT Agent technology by "Garmin Express". Which shows a similar behaviour.

Cheers,
OMB      

ShaneG - 12 December 2014 09:22 AM

Garmin ANT Agent and Garmin Express will both monopolize the stick and need to be shutdown in order to use it in other applications unless you have an additional ANT stick.

As for the automatic installation, Garmin branded sticks from the last couple years used to automatically install ANT Agent, but since the release of Garmin Express this feature has been disabled. The ANT drivers currently do not automatically install anything.

Thanks for clarifying that.

I'm still mystified as to how the Garmin ANT Agent got installed on my WIN 8 system (and that of a few other of our clients) without an explicit download by the user. Shall we just blame Microsoft

Thanks Rob      

which means "just blame Garmin"