Development under OSX 10.9

VEX V5 General Discussion Technical Discussion
1

For those of you that are using PROS or eclipse/ConVEX under OSX 10.9 I have a few recommendations.

  1. The prolific programming cable just doesn’t work any more, it was working under older versions of OSX (10.6) but the latest drivers (V1.5.1) from prolific have broken it under 10.9. Without going into too many details, the problem is that the driver does not allow parity or stop bits to be set which therefore causes communication problems. You can use the cable to display output from the user program, but programming with either my open source flash utility or the PROS version does not work.

  2. The new VEX programming cable is fussy, I have now updated my open source flash utility to play nicely with it, it needed some delays between port setup (parity etc.) and sending the first characters to it, no idea why, may be a problem with the Apple driver I guess. The new cortexflash utility is on github here (which is the same place as it always was).
    https://github.com/jpearman/stm32flashCortex

  3. Other serial/USB cables seem to work OK, I tried one with the FTDI chipset inside (now supported by 10.9 without needing FTDI drivers) and a second with a MCS7820 chipset which was actually quite good as well. One issue with these alternative cables is that they often create device paths that PROS does not understand (ie. /dev/tty.MCS78XX_Port0.0 ). To solve this create a link to that device as follows

cd /dev
sudo ln -s tty.MCS78XX_Port0.0 tty.usbmodem-123

Now if you look at a listing of /dev you would see something like the following.

crw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel      17,   4 Mar 24 22:17 tty.MCS78XX_Port0.0
crw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel      17,   6 Mar 24 22:17 tty.MCS78XX_Port1.1
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root   wheel            0 Mar 24 21:11 tty.usbmodem-123 -> tty.MCS78XX_Port0.0

This is now a device that PROS will find.

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