I’ve had my UD-CA1A for 2 years now. It has worked almost great the whole time.
I run a MacBook Pro 15", 2018 with a a Radeon Pro 555x 4GB and Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB with a Samsung LS27F352FHNXZA External monitor. MacOS Mojave 10.14.6
When I first wake up the Mac all the devices connected to the dock work fine (keyboards, wireless mouse, network, external drive), however the monitor NEVER works. The only way to get a signal from the dock to the monitor is to pull the power from the dock and reapply power.
I have installed the latest drivers from the website (DisplayLink driver v4.3). This has become more and more annoying and more and more a pain in the rump. Can anyone help?
Thanks for reaching out to us, I am sorry to hear this is not working as expected.
Our expected behavior with our UD-CA1A docking station and Thunderbolt 3 MacBook Pro systems is the external display should be detected when the system is powered on or waking from a low power state and show the desktop background while logging into the computer.
The UD-CA1A USB-C docking station does not utilize the DisplayLink software, this docking station takes advantage of the computer’s Thunderbolt 3 Type-C DisplayPort Alternate Mode, a direct connection from the computer’s graphics processor to the Thunderbolt 3 port, and across the USB Type-C cable to the docking station.
I would like to start off by getting some additional details on the process that reproduces this behavior to start narrowing down the possible causes of this behavior, when you have a moment please let me know the following:
Is the docking station connected with the original USB-C cable or using a cable from another manufacturer or product?
Does the display go offline when the computer is restarted, or powered off and powered back on again? Or is this only happening when the computer is left idle and enters the sleep state?
When the display is working, does disconnecting the docking station from the computer then reconnecting the docking station cause the display to become undetected or does it work as expected?
When the display goes off, does restarting the system ( but not unplugging power from the docking station ) restore the display?
Thank you for these additional details, they will help to determine our next steps.
Thanks for the additional details, since this is only happening when the system sleeps it does not appear to be a faulty docking station. If the docking station was failing I would expect to see similar behavior on restarts, shutdown/power on events, as well as when disconnected from the system.
Requiring the docking station to be reset points to the internal DisplayPort Alternate Mode chipset is being set to a bad state, this could be caused by the system when sending data over the DisplayPort connection.
Our first step is to reset the system SMC to see if this helps. Normally the SMC ( System Management Controller ) deals with power states and power state transitions, charging, fans and low level functions of the system. Apple provides full instructions here ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295 ) for both modern and legacy systems.
Please let me know if this helps and we can go from there.
I followed the directions provided at the link and it doesn’t seem to have fixed anything. Even after a system reboot the second screen still does not work. The mac doesn’t even RECOGNIZE that a second monitor is pugged in according to the Preferences:Display screen. As soon as I unplug the power on the docking station and replug the second monitor immediately powers up and the Mac Display Preferences window recognizes the monitor.
Thanks for giving this a try, it is very odd behavior.
I would like to get some additional details from the system, both when the display is working and when it is non-functional. Our PlugDebug log tool gathers system logs and creates a .zip file on the desktop, for privacy I would recommend not attaching these log files to the forum, rather they can be emailed to us directly.
If you would, please keep the dock connected and monitor attached ( when it is working ) and attach the output of our diagnostic utility PlugDebug ( http://plugable.com/support/plugdebug ) to an email to ‘support@plugable.com’ with the subject line ‘292468 - Attention Pat’ as this will allow us to examine some log files from your system to help determine the next steps. Please also run the utility when the display is non-functional and attach this to a separate email with the same subject line to the same address, please note in the body of each email the state of the display when the logs were gathered. The two emails should prevent the files from being blocked by our inbound email size restrictions.
Hopefully the log files will shed some additional details on how the system is detecting the docking station and external display.