Propellor board seen on USB by Mac but not by SimpleIDE

edwardjarchibald

I just received a Propellor BOE and followed the instructions for the "Hello World" example. The board is powered up, turned on, and connected to my Mac via a USB cable. The board appears as in the following 'system_profiler SPUSBDataType' output but when I start up SimpleIDE, select the 'HUB' board type, and even hit 'Rescan Serial Ports' a few times, I never see a port in the drop-down list. Have I missed something?

I posted a similar query in the regular Parallax support portal, but posted it here as well since I believe it's likely to be a SimpleIDE issue rather than a board issue.



USB High-Speed Bus:


Host Controller Location: Built-in USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x7fa700003b34
PCI Revision ID: 0x7fa700000006
PCI Vendor ID: 0x7fa700008086
Bus Number: 0xfd


Hub:


Product ID: 0x2514
Vendor ID: 0x0424 (SMSC)
Version: 0.03
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Location ID: 0xfd100000 / 2
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 2


PropBOE:


Product ID: 0x6001
Vendor ID: 0x0403 (Future Technology Devices International Limited)
Version: 6.00
Serial Number:
Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Parallax Inc.
Location ID: 0xfd130000 / 5
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 500

jazzed

Are other applications able to see your serial port? If so, what is the port name?
Mac serial port names usually look like /dev/tty.usb... or /dev/cu.usb...

edwardjarchibald

jazzed wrote: »

Are other applications able to see your serial port? If so, what is the port name?
Mac serial port names usually look like /dev/tty.usb... or /dev/cu.usb...

Thanks for the tip. I did not see any such names among the device names even when I had not only the BOE plugged in, but also a few other devices. All showed up in the system_profiler listing. On doing some more research, it seems that the FTDI drivers that were formerly supplied as a part of the Mac OS X releases were not there, by default, on Mountain Lion. So I downloaded the latest drivers here:

http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

Once the drivers were on board, I plugged in the BOE, and I see this in the listing:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 33, 11 Dec 11 20:26 cu.usbserial-000014FD
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 33, 10 Dec 11 20:26 tty.usbserial-000014FD

Starting up SimpleIDE, I see the /dev/cu.usbserial-000014FD showing in the UI.

Problem solved!

Regards,

Edward

jazzed

Good job Glad you got it working.

If the latest OS-X doesn't have FTDI drivers by default then we have to cover that. Wonder if Apple decided the FTDI drivers are not good enough.