cbmuse Or would I
need to use the wifi dongle or ethernet to communicate with it instead?
That would be the easiest solution. I think once you are using the USB cable, you get a ground loop that you won't be able to get rid of without an isolation transformer on all other I/Os. To connect via ethernet, if you have a router available that runs a DHCP server, it is enough to connect the board to the router and then go to http://bela.local/ from another device connected to the same network. If you don't have such a router in your setup and want to connect directly the ethernet cable to your computer and you don't want to set up a DHCP server on your computer, then the easiest thing for a point-to-point ethernet connection is to edit the file /etc/network/interfaces
on the board.
Where it says
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
remove the second line and add these instead:
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.8.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.8.0
(be very careful not to make mistakes, or you may struggle to access the board via USB!) and reboot.
On the host computer, set the IP address of the ethernet interface to static 192.168.8.1 . Then you should be able to reach the board to http://192.168.8.2 when connected over ethernet.