Mac USB-to-Serial adapters
I love my MacBook Pro. It does everything I need so far with one exception: serial communication.
Some of the service engineers I know use the Keyspan adapter with their MBPs. My local Best Buy doesn't carry this, and I didn't want to wait for shipping. They do carry the Dynex adapter, though, which I purchased.
After a lot of poking around I found that I couldn't get the vendor drivers to cooperate. Happily there's an open source driver that works great. As it turns out, the Dynex adapter uses the PL2303 chip which seems to be somewhat popular. The Sourceforge project can be found at http://osx-pl2303.sourceforge.net/.
Install the driver, then reboot.
To use the adapter you'll need something that can talk serial. Mac OS X Leopard provides this functionality with the screen command.
To use your Dynex adapter with screen:
$ sudo su -
# screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0000101D 9600
The speed argument depends on what you're talking to.
You'll need the right cables, too. Of course I didn't have them. With a little effort, you can make serial cables, which I'll address in my next post.
I use a USB-to-Serial cable from CablesToGo (product #26886). It works great. I use the program ZTerm to interface with it. It's equivalent to HyperTerminal for Windows. How long have you been a MAC junkie?
Bobby
Posted by Bobby on March 05, 2009 at 02:53 PM EST #
Hey Jason,
Good afternoon. What program do you use on the MAC to access the USB port so you can see what is going on on the console ports? Not sure what program to even use or how to set it up as a newbie to MACs, and got it for work. Yuickes! Thanks!!
Georve
Posted by George on March 20, 2009 at 06:50 PM EDT #
Thanks for this.
I have a longer (6') cable on order from the Internets, but based on your recommendation just picked up the Dynex from Best Buy so that I can have something to work with for the next few days.
FYI for any of your other readers: the vendor driver appears to work on Tiger (10.4.11) PPC. (As does the OSX-PL2303 driver, of course.)
Posted by James Dasher on May 27, 2009 at 06:29 PM EDT #