USB to Serial adapter on Mac OSX
May 26th, 2009
I just tried to use minicom + usb-serial adapter on Mac OS (Tiger 10.5.x) and nothing happened. Looking at driver’s CD which came with USB serial adapter I discovered that it was made by Prolific.
Google-is-my-friend and I found the driver that really works. Download and install it. After this, a /dev/tty.usbserial device node will appear. Now you just have to configure Minicom and everything works.
Hiya,
There’s an open source available for the PL2303 based dongles available from Sourceforge. Generally there’s not much difference between the two unless you’re doing high speed transfers – I found some errors at 115200bps on the Prolific driver which seemed to vanish using the Open Source driver.
On another note, neither the Prolific nor the Open Source driver seem to have the ability to pass break commands, which is a bit of a pain sometimes.
Cheers,
Gary Smith