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Call me a Luddite if you wish, but I lament the lack of serial ports in modern laptops.

My relationship with USB-to-Serial cables has been one of disappointments, crashed computers, and garbled data. The one I pulled out of a drawer this week randomly flipped the most significant bit of every character. How do I know this? Because I wasted three long nights debugging the problem.

But I’m a changed person now because I learned this one amazing trick for making USB-to-Serial just work on macOS: Manual hoist inspection.

Use a version of macOS newer than 10.9 and use a cable with FTDI chip.

Do this and you will never have to fuzz around with manually installing drivers from shady websites! And you can now unplug the USB-to-Serial cable while your computer is sleeping without provoking a crash – amazing!

macOS >= 10.9 comes with (working) FTDI drivers

macOS includes kernel drivers for FTDI chips as of version 10.9, aka “Mavericks”, released in 2013. I can’t find the Engadget article about the five minute time slot Phil Schiller devoted to announcing this revolutionary innovation at WWDC, but here is the official Apple tech note.

I had no idea because the last time I tried using a USB-to-Serial cable on macOS was with version 10.8.

FTDI vs. Prolific

Admittedly, I’m less certain about this part of the amazing trick.

As far as I am aware, there are only two manufacturers of USB-to-Serial converter chips at the moment: FTDI and Prolific. These companies design the silicone that lives inside a small black box that lives on a printed circuit board that lives inside your converter cable. The cable is made by a different manufacturer, but the product description usually tells you which “chipset” is embedded in the cable.

My anecdotal evidence is that the cable with the Prolific chip paired with the Prolific driver from the Prolific website gave me the garbled data, while the FTDI cable with no extra effort has been working great.

Therefore, the cable with the Prolific chip now lives at Ox Mountain (the local landfill) while the cable with the FTDI chip will be used to connect to a barcode reader.

Other USB-to-Serial Trivia

• FTDI stands for Future Technology Devices International Ltd. and is headquartered in Scotland.
• There are two types of drivers for FTDI chips: The VCP driver (Virtual COM Port) makes a port show up that can be used by any program as if it were a serial port. There’s also a version that comes as a DLL and is meant for being bundled with device software.
• Every serial device shows up as two entries in /dev, one starting with cu. and another starting with tty.. This Stackoverflow post explains the history of that in a way that does not assume prior knowledge of pre-internet style networking. Because most modern RS232 devices don’t even have the hardware flow control lines connected, tty and cu usually behave identically. But when they don’t, cu is usually the device you want to open, as explained in this SO thread.

Prolific USB to Serial AdapterThere are a couple different USB to serial adapters that you might use as a network engineer. The one pictured in the article is manufactured by Prolific, but sold by multiple different vendors.

There’s also another manufactured by FTDI, which I’ve heard good things about, and of course the one built into recent Cisco hardware. The driver for the chip used by Cisco is conveniently included in OS X, but the FTDI and Prolific chips require their own drivers. Myself, I have used the Prolific cables for years and have been generally happy with them.The best drivers for the Prolific come directly from the manufacturer, not the vendors that resell them. This is because the vendor provided drivers always seem to be out of date. However, the drivers from Prolific don’t work with all cables out of the box. I’m going to show you how to fix that. Get the DriverIf you haven’t already, hop over to the Prolific site to download the driver and install it.

Here’s the URL at the time of this writing:If you are running OS X Yosemite, you may need to read this article to get the driver working:. Discover Magic NumbersOK, the numbers aren’t really magic, but the driver will need them so that it can be associated with your USB device. Head to Apple - About This Mac and and choose System Report. Select USB and scroll until you find your Prolific USB device.

It should look something like this:Watch for the Manufacturer (circled in blue). Then note the Product ID and Vendor ID (circled in red). We will be adding these to the driver.

3. Hex to Decimal Conversion. Calculator in hex modeWe need to convert the hex numbers to decimal. An easy way to do that is to run Calculator and hit Command-3. Click the “16” above the clear button to switch to hex and enter the number you want to convert (like 0x2008 from the example). Now click the 10 and you have the hex to decimal conversion. If you used 0x2008, you should get 8200. You need to convert both the product and vendor IDs.

Edit the DriverFire up your favorite terminal emulator and head here: cd /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/ContentsAt this point, you will need to either fire off a root shell or sudo everything.Safety First! Backup your Info.plist so you can fix the driver if you break it.Edit Info.plist with your editor of choice. Scroll down and you will find a section that looks like this:code language=”xml”05572008CFBundleIdentifiercom.prolific.driver.PL2303IOClasscomprolificdriverPL2303IOProviderClassIOUSBInterfacebConfigurationValue1bInterfaceNumber0idProduct8200idVendor1367/codeWhat you want to do is copy and paste that section. I don’t think the actually matters, but you can change it to match the hex version of the vendor and product ID. So if your vendor ID was 0x2478 for Tripplite with a product ID of 0x2008, you can change the key for your new section to:code language=”xml”24782008/codeThen you will want to put the decimal version of that you converted before into the idProduct and idVendor sections.

So for the Tripplite example you only need to change the idVendor and it would look like this:code language=”xml”idVendor9336/codeSo the final product for my Tripplite version of the Prolific adapter works when I have this section added:code language=”xml”24782008CFBundleIdentifiercom.prolific.driver.PL2303IOClasscomprolificdriverPL2303IOProviderClassIOUSBInterfacebConfigurationValue1bInterfaceNumber0idProduct8200idVendor9336/code 5. Kick the DriverNow you need to unload and reload the driver to load the new settings: $ kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext$ kextload /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kextYou should now have a working USB device! This is a bit of a hassle. I recently found another way to solve this problem, but it’s not free and it’s another blog post.FIN.

Hi guys.A while ago on El Capitan, this solution worked. Now in High Sierra I’ve seen a challenge.