Wow talk about mind blown check this out;
On Tuesday night I had a council meeting I had to get to at 7pm , so I was going to work until 630 but suddenly around 6pm my Wacom Cintiq got a little buggy. I’m running a Wacom Cintiq 13WX on a 2019 iMac Retina 4K with Catalina as the OS. My normally smooth ink line was blotchy— as if I was drawing with a leaky fountain pen. That’s not helpful. I checked a few common things, even looked at brush settings and nothing seemed to work.
I went into System Preferences to calibrate the tablet and lo and behold while the driver was installed it was saying there was no tablet connected. From there I went to DISPLAYS and that confirmed there was no tablet because it should have been listed as another monitor.
Shutting down for the night I figured I’d spend the next morning figuring it out. There’s nothing as fun as climbing under the desk and checking and rechecking wiring. I even did a SMC reset which is when you shut down your Mac, unplug the power cord, press and hold the start button for five seconds and then reconnect and start it up again— this is supposed to rejuice all your USB ports.
Nadda.
I did an internet search to see what I could find, Mac Forums gave me a bunch of suggestions but nothing worked, then I searched for the phrase above and what was the first hit? Well some bloke named Andy Fish wrote a blog post in October 2012 which said the following;
How to get your Mac to recognize your Wacom Cintiq and stop driving you crazy.
All right this was driving me crazy-- I spent a day and a half on the internet trying to find an answer to this and couldn't-- now that I figured it out here's the solution-- and it's actually so easy that's why it was hard to figure out.
The message is telling you that there is No Sync between your computer and your tablet-- so it goes to sleep. No matter what else you think-- its purely your connection OR its the DVI/VGA switch on the side of the power unit.
1. Un plug EVERYTHING-- and I mean EVERYTHING-- trust me-- I half assed it multiple times and it didn't work until I redid EVERYTHING.
2. TURN OFF both the tablet and the computer while everything is detached.
3. CAREFULLY re-assemble your connection-- with special attention to the tightness of the connection joints.
4. Turn ON your computer-- let it completely load.
5. Turn ON your tablet-- it should reflect your desktop or at least not go to sleep. Now you can go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and set it up the way you want it.
NOTE: If you go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and you aren't able to click on GATHER DISPLAYS or DETECT DISPLAYS that means there is something faulty with your connection.
AND IF THAT DOESN'T WORK;
6. Throw the DVI/VGA switch and the tablet should come to life.
Trust me, I hear ya. "I did that and it doesn't work." Nope. Do it the right way, making sure everything is connected and it WILL work.
My favorite part of the whole post was that last line— because even now, even though I was the guy that wrote this first post, I still was going to try to cut corners to get this to work and it only worked when I followed the instructions to the letter.
So basically spent a whole morning trying to find an answer I already had! That my friends is the primary reason I write this blog in the first place.