Serial port under OS X

06 Aug 2009 . Edited: 06 Aug 2009

Hi,

do I need to do anything special (or straightforward) to get my Mac to recognise mbed as a serial port?  Your doco tells me to look at /dev/tty.usbmodem* but I don't have anything that matches.

Shareef.

06 Aug 2009

Hi Shareef,

do I need to do anything special (or straightforward) to get my Mac to recognise mbed as a serial port?  Your doco tells me to look at /dev/tty.usbmodem* but I don't have anything that matches.

That depends. Have you been using it on windows?

If so, it is likely you put an "mbed.ini" file on the disk to enable the windows-specific serial port mode. Assuming you did, just delete this and then power-cycle (unplug + replug the mbed), and it'll come back up in the default mode, where the serial port should work for mac/linux.

If that is not the case (i.e. there is no mbed.ini on your disk), we'll need to investigate more, but i suspect that is the case. Please confirm either way...

Simon

06 Aug 2009

Ooh, can't believe you're forcing me to choose between Mac and Windows development....Mac it is then.

That works fine now, cheers.

06 Aug 2009

Hmm, not quite there.  Under Windows and Tera Term you have to set up the new line format for LF.  How do you do that using screen?  The man page doesn't make it clear and before I search the whole interwebs, I thought you might have done it already.

Cheers.

10 Nov 2010

hey simon, i have had the same problem with the serial communication for the mac as well, except, I do not have the mbed.ini file on the mbed.

Would you happen to have any suggestions?

 

Thanks

Henry

10 Nov 2010

Hi Henry,

This thread was related to a beta version of the hardware/firmware; the mbed.ini file is no longer required so don't worry about that.

The serial port should just appear when you plug it in to a mac, see:

It should "just work"! Perhaps it comes in as a different name depending on the OS version? Perhaps anyone else has things they've needed to do on mac to make it work?

Can you work through the instructions above and see if you can see the serial port, and if not, give us a bit more about your exact OS/hardware so others can help out.

Simon

10 Nov 2010

I just run the following line as a shell script in a terminal window:

screen /dev/tty.usbmodemfd122

I am running Leopard 10.6.4. It may be that you get a different fdxxx but it is easy enough to have a quick look in /dev/

Greg

11 Nov 2010

ahhh.... i see, well the problem was that I am very new to the terminal program on the mac and when trying to see the list of available com ports it does not list all the items in a traditional up and down manner, it was off to the right. thanks for your help guys.

 

Henry