[Ham-Mac] Renaming USBtoUART ID's

[Dino Papas]

It took several hours last night, and much help from friend Chuck AI4WU, for me to figure out why every time I power cycle my Icom 7600 that programs like fldigi, flrig, Aether and others were no longer recognizing the USB path to the radio without manually reselecting the connection path.  Long story short I found the culprit to be my repositioned Davis Weather console, recently moved from my XP PC to the Bootcamp Windows 8.1 side of my Mac, as it was continuously plugged in and had “hijacked” the port ID:

/dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART

and that the USB path used to connect to the radio would then be assigned the enumeration:

/dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUARTXX

where XX was a incrementing number that increased by one digit with each radio power cycle - problem is that the programs still thought that XX minus one was the path to take.  The I/O is a Silicon Laboratories USB to UART device for both the weather station and the radio.

Now, unplugging the WX station is a fix since simply plugging it in to download WX data from the console infrequently w/o the radio turned on isn’t a big deal.  But does anyone know of a way to reassign the IDs permanently somehow so they don’t “conflict” with each other causing the incrementing enumeration issue for one of the devices?  I have found some stuff on how to do that with FTDI serial devices - of course mucking around there is pretty scary as you could end up bricking a device if you’re not careful.  BTW, here’s the link to the FTDI utility I found:

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2010/01/27/pirate-rename-get-a-nicely-named-serial-device/

Anybody else had this problem USB/UART I/O and found a fix?

Thanks in advance!

73 - Dino KL0S