from tom igoe:

So I'm working with a new serial-to-USB chip, the CP2102 from Silicon Labs
(got a nice adaptor from Sparkfun). On the mac, its drivers show up as a
serial port in any non-rxtx-based application. I can ls /dev/tty.* and
get it, as /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART. It shows up in zTerm. But it doesn't
show up in Processing, Wiring 0005, Arduino 0002, or any Java application
written with rxtx as the drivers. It shows up in all the PC versions of
that application just fine.

But wait, there's more: On another mac, it shows up just fine in all of
them. On my machine, there's another port missing in the rxtx list:
/dev/tty.modem. So here's my question:

Do any of you know of a file somewhere that rxtx caches the serial port
list in? Or any reason why it would list the ports differently from
another application?

assuming this isn't just the issue from the faq (run macosx_setup.command)...

are both systems using the same version of macosx?

the port iteration will be different from rxtx since it uses the low-level
unix APIs for talking to serial, rather than an app like zterm, which is
using something from Carbon (or Cocoa, if they've rewritten it).

rxtx may also just be buggy.. there's a mailing list archive on rxtx.org
that occasionally has useful mac-related tidbits.

it's here in RXTXCommDriver.java

function
private void registerScannedPorts(int PortType)

the comment
/*
* Look for all entries in deviceDirectory, and if they look like they
should
* be serial ports on this OS and they can be opened then register them.
*/

the array that gets built depending on the platform CandidatePortPrefixes

adding to that function will fix the problem


massimo

*** Bug 184 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

> it's here in RXTXCommDriver.java
>
> function
> private void registerScannedPorts(int PortType)
>
>
> the array that gets built depending on the platform CandidatePortPrefixes
>
> adding to that function will fix the problem



Got it. So Ben, did you just use the rxtx compiled binaries for Processing
0089 and beyond, or do you have a copy of the source that you compiled
from? I couldn't find it in the processing CVS, and it turns out that the
latest version on the rxtx CVS only lists a small number of serial ports,
all of them old names for the Keyspan drivers. I'd like to get Processing
(and Arduino and Wiring, for that matter) to list all of the serial ports
properly, but I'm not sure where to look.

-Tom

i'm just using rxtx binaries from the site... is there something more recent from their site
that does a better job of handling this?

Doesn't look like anything more current, but I'll mess around with it today
and let you know if I get any results.