Opened the first device. Connected the power cable. Clicked the power button. Waited for some time and connected to the SSID printed on the manual using my Mac book.
Navigated to the spark local website. Clicked continue on Language And Timezone. Accepted Terms and Conditions. Created a new account - provided username and password. Confirmed password. Provided local wifi details.
System gave an inane comment about not being able to connect and my Mac reconnected back to the local wifi.
Nothing. No indication that anything was happening.
Checked local network on Mac. Found the new device had connected to wifi. Used NVIDIA sync, entered details as provided. Unexpected Error - Handshake failed. Tried to ssh. Authentication failed. I had saved the password directly into chrome to make sure I had not made a mistake. Tried to ping the system. It was connected to the local network. But neither SSH nor NVIDIA Sync Worked.
During this period, created a recovery USB just in case.
Tried restarting. Same issue.
Connected HDMI to device, connected keyboard via usb-c. Plugged power out. Waited 15s. Plugged power in. Nothing. No display.
Tried again. Display came on. NVDA logo. Spinner. Then went dead. Pinging the device from Mac worked after 1 minute.
Tried to restart. Multiple times, kept hitting the del key to get to BIOS. But the device did not show anything on display.
At this point, I switched to the other device. Wasted another hour and half. Same problem.
One issue I had is that my internal, local-network domain is not “xyz.local” I have my internal router set to resolve the local domain by a different name, rather than “ .local”
When the wifi setup attempted to hand-off to the local domain, the WebUI on the Mac said it couldn’t be found. But changing the URL to match actual name for my internal network worked fine.
I ran into some other issues because the first mandatory update process on the Spark, had some sort of issue and failed to actually complete the update properly. NVSync on my Mac indicated that it had another update to do, I clicked that and got into a bad state that I posted a new thread about.
I followed the instructions for using the recovery image, which worked fine and I restored it, ran the setup process with a monitor/keyboard/ethernet connected and everything worked well since.
It is probably superstitious on my part, but I’d recommend doing the first out of box setup with a keyboard/monitor and ethernet if at all possible.
I never got the recommended wifi approach to work. Always got connection refused although I could connect to the broadcast wifi from the box. Without rebooting, I connected my monitor to USB (using a HDMI to USB cable I use on my Mac Studio). Then I saw that it was up and running and I was barely able to connect mouse and keyboard (both requiring USB-A converters). I was just barely able to plug everything in physically (space). Thankfully setup was fine from there. Only after this first stage setup did my spark-xxxx.local address start working. I already had wired ethernet attached (from the start). Now I can use NVIDIA Sync on both Mac and Windows and all is good.
My point is that you might want to try USB-C for monitor. Although I would not bet on this helping. Afterall you did have HDMI working earlier. I no longer have a monitor plugged in to my Spark, that was just for setup, now power and network cables are all I need.
About to start setting up a 2nd Spark to work as a pair.
Oh, yeah, my first update from within Sync thankfully worked fine, although it took a lot longer than 10 minutes.
For whatever it is worth, I had no problem with common USB-C docking station and a (old) Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse with the wireless dongle plugged into one of the USB-A ports on the mini-docking station, a BenQ QHD monitor on HDMI on the Spark and wired 1gb ethernet on the Spark.
The same USB-dock and wireless keyboard worked fine in UEFI as well.
Thanks for the comments @Larry-SB and @erikshop . I tried with my Samsung primary monitor. I then used the USB-C to test it out as @erikshop recommended (I used a USB-C to HDMI - apple accessory).
The issue is something else, because I was able to see the logo and the spinner once (initially). I was able to get into the BIOS. But no luck post that.
Without any kind of display, it is impossible to get into the BIOS and flash it. Tried to del-tap my way into the BIOS multiple times but it did not work post the first attempt on device 1.
For a device positioned for retail devs, esp for someone with hands on experience in LLMs, this device was a massive letdown. I did not get a chance to check out if the memory bandwidth would be an active limitation. Was planning to fine tune tool calling for a few use cases on Qwen models and am back to the cloud for now.
I am curious what your experience was with the device? Any fine-tuning stories yet?
I am holding on to it for another 5 days, post which will move ahead with a refund. Have not heard back from the support team yet.
Ouch! My last guess would be to see if it can boot from USB. I don’t know the boot order and it sounds like you cannot get to the BIOS. I think that ESC keys (holding down right away while it boots) is another key to enter BIOS mode. Btw, you don’t need to hit the power button. If you have it unplugged, and plug in the power, use your wired keyboard to press and hold ESC key for a fair bit of time. If you get nothing in a minute or two, then let it go.
If booting from USB has priority and your rescue USB drive is bootable, then you might have a chance.