This is going to be more of a short how-to or thereabouts and a request for club3d to provide newer firmware for the chips mentioned in the topic.
Especially the CSV-1550 is advertised to work with at least Windows 10/11, but this is simply not true. I am unsure wether or not this affects every shipped unit or if some units are equipped with newer firmware that works. With my unit, it does not work. At all.
How the CSV-1550 and CSV-7300 work is that there is the Synaptics VMM5330 chip in them (found at https://www.synaptics.com/products/video-interface-ics datasheet can be found elsewhere for those curious) that acts as the MST hub for the displayport signal. In the CSV-1550 there is in addition a built-in usb-c alt-mode and power delivery controller chip to handle the usb-c port signaling to output a displayport signal and power for CSV-1550, the VIA Labs VL103 (https://www.via-labs.com/product_show.php?id=92 and specifically the vl103-q3 form factor chip).
Now for the fun part. Club3D (and startech and Delock afaik) used the reference design from synaptics for these devices and the only part that differs is the PCB layout. This can be seen with fwupdtool in linux. The VMM5330 attaches a sideband control channel into the displayport aux data channel through which its firmware can be updated. The VL103 similarly has an inband control channel through the usb-c connection (called a billboard device).
One needs the latest (at time of writing 1.9.19) version of fwupd for this to work since the older methods of accessing present in older versions of fwupd are obsolete and will not work. For at least debian and ubuntu, one can use the official(ish) snap (https://snapcraft.io/fwupd) versions of fwupd in case the system does not have this newer version directly available (this is not recommended for regular use with generic distros but will work for most cases).
To be able to access these devices at all, one needs some extra things to configure for fwupd. With the snap versions of fwupd, one needs to add the quirk files for the vmm5330 reference board and the vl100 and vl103 chips. These go into /var/snap/fwupd/common/var/lib/fwupd/quirks.d/. These two chips are not included to be accessed by fwupd by default and thus you need the contents of the following fwupd quirk files. VMM5330: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/blob/main/plugins/synaptics-mst/synaptics-mst-evb.quirk and VL100 and VL103: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/blob/main/plugins/vli/vli-noinst.quirk
After all this, one can use fwupd to see the devices and possibly push firmware onto them. Using “fwupdtool get-devices” one should see the vmm5330 and vl103 chips show up and report being upgradable. Afterwards if one gets the appropriate firmware blobs, one could push those with “install-blob FILENAME DEVICE-ID” (see the actual syntax for file and device-id from fwupd examples and such).
I have been mentioning the vl100 chip but talking about vl103 the whole time? CSV-7300 is an identical device to CSV-1550, only that the vl103 chip has been removed from it and it requires external power via a usb cable. One can use CAC-1567 to output a displayport signal from a usb-c port and lo and behold, it holds a vl100 chip which can be accessed identically. Internally the vl103 chip has the vl100 functionality and has slapped on the power deliver in addition. The CAC-1567 ironically works whereas the vl103 chip included CSV-1550 does not for whatever reason.
Heres the Club3D part. There are known issues with the VMM5330 and VL103 chips that have newer firmware available from Synaptics and VIA Labs. For instance CSV-7300 (and propably CSV-1550, but with the vl103, this propable renders the device inoperable) suffers from intermittent blacking out and loss of clock signal on the outputs that is not fixable via any cabling replacements or other physical signal boosting methods. It in addition suffers from DSC input and output decompression issues with the shipped version of the firmware (in my devices 5.04.01). I am certain that the VIA Labs chips suffer from some kind of issues as well but they are more elusive in nature.
I implore Club3D to provide newer firmwares for these devices (CSV-1550, CSV-7300, CAC-1567) that would according to Synaptics and some personal research fix many of the issues people are facing with these devices. At the end, i will repeat that the CSV-1550 does _not_ work with even Windows 10/11, thus the newer firmwares for the chips would likely be a requirement for them to work at all.
