I wonder if they're not getting enough power?
Still unclear....
I have rosewill's and dlink hubs
I inserted one into hub:
(...)
Still not sure of power... is there a light on these things?
Just to clarify - the question is whether the devices get enough power or not. It is not what is the brand of the hub.
The only thing that matters is if those are powered hub or not.
You need a powered hub. And you appear to have a regular one that draws all its power from the PC. That power is barely enough for 1 device (when you add the power used by the hub).
From your logs it appears that the NanoFury devices do get detected and they pass the first check (that's when it reads the serial numbers), but once the chip gets turned on and given work to do (which leads to the chip starting to need and use all that power) you get a "checkport failed" message indicating that the device no longer responds.
So the only difference between the first check and after the second check is that the second time the chip is working and using power.
That leads me to suspect that your hubs are likely not powered or don't have enough power.
You can easily check if my theory is correct by plugging just one device into a USB port directly on your computer (and not via hub and not on a RasPI since its ports are not properly powered - e.g. don't provide at least 500mA as per the USB2.0 specs).
The NanoFury devices do have a light - that white component on the board is the LED. It will turn on (yellow) when the device is working. In your case since it probably runs out of power very quickly you may see this light turn on for a very brief moment - like a fraction of a second (e.g. 10-20mS).