[Ham-Mac] Serial devices names

[Jack Brindle]

As a Mac developer since 1984, I now, as all Mac developers should, that the correct place to research serial port and other Macintosh development questions is at http://developer.apple.com. You should do quite a bit of research there, including taking a good look at the serial port examples. There are a couple of decent public domain serial port classes for Cocoa. I don't use them since I have developed my own serial port handlers that are quite good. Your question indicates that you don't really understand the serial port naming scheme - it varies depending on the specific driver that each serial port adapter manufacturer codes into their devices (and in the case of FTDI and Keyspan, their drivers).

/dev/cu/cu,usbserial is rarely used as a name on the Mac - there is almost always additional information in the name to designate the specific device among potentially many. The correct way to determine and select available interfaces is through the application-layer I/O  interfaces. You should see this very quickly with a look at the serial interface example from Apple.

Secondly, Mac OS X drivers are dramatically different from Windows drivers. A Mac driver will not work on Windows machines (or Linux for that matter), nor vice-versa. Parallels, VMWare and Virtualbox won't help you here. 

Your post, and the way it was written, is very much a troll. If you are going to program on a platform, learn the tools, frameworks and libraries of that platform in depth. As decades of Macintosh software has shown, then, and only then, will your software be satisfactory and useful to others.

Jack Brindle, W6FB


On Sep 4, 2011, at 11:21 AM, T. Joseph Carter wrote:

> It was a serious question, if you don't want to answer it, you don't 
> have to.  I'm writing Mac software to interface with radios for which 
> existing software is limited or non-existent.
> 
> I have used Macs and little else since 2003, and rather than have to 
> piddle with VMWare to program my radios, I am trying to do something 
> about it.  For myself alone, I'd just code /dev/cu.usbserial since 
> that's all I'm ever likely to see on my iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook 
> Air.  It just seemed more appropriate to support everything else too.
> 
> Joseph - KF7QZC
> 
> 
> On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 09:29:40AM -0700, Jack Brindle wrote:
>> Wow! It's not often we get trolling on this list.
>> 
>> Jack B, W6FB
>> 
>> 
>> On Sep 4, 2011, at 5:19 AM, T. Joseph Carter wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey everyone,
>>> 
>>> I'm doing some development for the Mac that needs to be able to
>>> control devices over serial ports.  I've got one handy, a Prolific
>>> device, that creates /dev/cu.usbserial when plugged in, given the
>>> appropriate Prolific driver.
>>> 
>>> I can't find my Keyspan device right now, but I know it creates
>>> something else (still being a /dev/cu.something).  Any others I
>>> should know about?
>>> 
>>> PCI cards in Power Cheesegraters?  VMWare/Parallels VMs?
>>> 
>>> Anything short of a Hackintosh seems to be fair game for things I'd
>>> want to support.  And my opposition to shrinkwrap license silliness
>>> causes me to say if you wanna try to boot OS X on your piece of crap
>>> Dell, go for it—as long as you don't ask me to fix it when it doesn't
>>> work right.  ;)  (But that's a whole other discussion!)
>>> 
>>> Joseph - KF7QZC
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