serial port fail on Mac OS

[ajerschow]

Serial dongle does not work on Mac OS 10.5.8.

Using USB to serial cable and the serial dongle that came with SpokePOV. Using driver osx-pl2303-0.3.1-10.4-universal
(from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2 ... g/download).

Serial port appears under /dev/cu.PL2303-00001004 but no connection can be made with a terminal program (e.g. 'screen'), or with SpokePOV.

Any ideas about how this could be solved?
(also, could you post instructions for the proper way to test voltages on the dongle?)
Thank you

[adafruit_support_bill]

The serial dongle is all passive components, so there is not much that can go wrong with it.

Post some photos of the boards (dongle and spokePOV) and we'll have a look for any assembly problems.

[ajerschow]

Please find photos attached. Any advice is appreciated.

[adafruit_support_bill]

The dongle assembly looks fine. Do you have photos of the spokePOV?

Also, from the project page:

Important Note: under MacOS X, using a USB/serial adapter, sometimes there are multiple names for one port (/dev/cu.KeySerial1 and /dev/cu.USA19H1b1P1.1 for example. Try both! I've found they act differently and get better reliability with some over others!

[ajerschow]

Only one port is seen, /dev/cu.PL2303-00001004.

Attached are two more pictures of the SpokePOV for two units. They work fine with the default image, but as I mentioned the serial connection cannot be established.

[adafruit_support_bill]

I don't see any assembly problems there.

Serial port appears under /dev/cu.PL2303-00001004 but no connection can be made with a terminal program (e.g. 'screen'), or with SpokePOV.

Are you able to open the COM port at all?

[ajerschow]

Under Mac OS, connection fails. Also a terminal program doesn't show any communication.

On a laptop PC, using also the USB-to-serial connector and the appropriate prolific driver it doesn't work either. Windows sees it as COM5 but doesn't connect via SpokePOV (I don't have a PC with a dedicated COM port).

[adafruit_support_bill]

On the PC, have you tried increasing the delay as described here? (about 1/4 down): http://www.ladyada.net/make/spokepov/software.html

[ajerschow]

Yes, tried up to 10,000. Did not help

[adafruit_support_bill]

Does the USB/Serial + Dongle combination pass the "Test Port" test? (with no connection to the SopkePOV)

[ajerschow]

No, does not pass Test Port (neither connected nor disconnected to SpokePOV)

[adafruit_support_bill]

Does it give any meaningful error message or reason for failure?
I would suspect the USB/Serial cable is at fault. There just isn't much to the dongle itself and your soldering looks just fine.

[adafruit]

also try v1.2 of the spokepov software. something changed recently in the mac os

[ajerschow]

Indeed, using v. 1.2 helped. I can now run the serial port test with this version. All voltages are fine. However, when attempting to write to SpokePOV I get a fail. Any suggestions? (It seems that in v. 1.2 one cannot adjust the serial port delay?)

[adafruit]

Hrm, something changed in the latest mac os x. we're going to try to fix v1.4 but it may be a week or two because we lost our development system and have to reinstall it. can you use windows in the meantime?