/dev/tty.Serial* Missing in MacOS 10.9 (Mavericks)

macos serial-port usb tty osx-mavericks
Yuri Green picture Yuri Green · Oct 27, 2013 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

I'm not sure if this was as a result of a recent update to OSX 10.9, but for some reason, all the /dev/tty.Serial* and /dev/cu.Serial* targets are now missing, making serial communication with a connected USB device impossible, programatically.

I can see the USB device connecting in the "System Information" screens, and the device will connect appropriately with an installed instance of Windows running in a VMWare Fusion VM, but for the life of me, OSX will not give me a I/O-able target in /dev for the USB device. Did Apple move where the old /dev/tty.Serial* devices now hook into the system, or is this in fact just broken. I'm dead in the water until I can figure this out.

Answer

Jeroen picture Jeroen · Oct 29, 2013

I have been able to get my FTDI Serial Cable to work by reinstalling the driver and rebooting the computer. This has not seemed to work for all cables, but at least it worked for one with an FTDI chip...

This TTL-232R-5V-AJ cable gave me the following messages in /var/log/system.log

Oct 29 18:22:27 doc com.apple.kextd[12]: kext com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver  202189000 is in exception list, allowing to load
Oct 29 18:22:27 doc kernel[0]: FTDIUSBSerialDriver:        0  4036001 start - ok

And:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 19, 12 Oct 29 18:22 /dev/tty.usbserial-FTWWVW3A

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