You’re the 2^nd person to suggest I needed to plug directly into the display.  The manual I found seems to be less forth coming about doing that but another long search of the physical device yielded a deeply hidden USB mini-B port along the insertion guides of the display itself.  So, I have it connected directly and got

“pm display  40  - k70” showing in braille on the display.

Progress!  I am still learning braille so I’m a bit proud I could decipher that. 

I extracted  the driver software, ran setup.exe in the newly created folder, and installed the Windows Focus driver option.  The device is showing in device manager now as:

LibUSB-1.0: FreedomScientific [PAC Mate]

Device type:  libusb (WinUSB) devices

Manufacturer:  libusb 1.0

Device status  multi line  This device is working properly.

I restarted NVDA but automatic selection doesn’t appear to be working.  I found a new braille display in the list for Focus and Pac Mate.  Sadly, I get:

“Braille Display Error  dialog  Could not load the freedomScientific display.”

A system reboot later to be sure all was settled, I still get that error.

I found this in the NVDA log:

Error initializing display driver freedomScientific for kwargs {'port': 'auto'}

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "braille.pyc", line 1730, in setDisplayByName

  File "brailleDisplayDrivers\freedomScientific.pyc", line 241, in __init__

RuntimeError: No Freedom Scientific display found

INFO - braille.BrailleHandler.setDisplayByName (15:28:37.987) - MainThread (8036):

Loaded braille display driver noBraille, current display has 0 cells.

Any ideas?

                Dan