Serial Console on OSX

Serial Communication in OSX Terminal

I knew it had to be possible to view serial data in the OSX terminal window, but I’m not enough of a unix geek to figure it out. Finally, a little googling told me what I needed to know. Here’s how to read and send serial data from the terminal in OSX. (just like hyperterminal on windows)

I bought a USB Serial port that had MAC drivers. Check before you buy it that it has drivers. Not all USB Serial have MAC support. I assume that you have installed the correct drivers from here.

First, open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal). Next, type

ls /dev/tty.*


to get a list of your serial lines. Pick the one that you want to open. For example, my list looks like this:

gf:dev gf$ ls -al tty.*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 4 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 8 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 10 Jan 25 09:20 tty.PL2303-0000103D
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 0 Jan 25 07:32 tty.SerialPort-1
gf:dev gf$


And I know /dev/tty.PL2303-0000103D is the USB-to-serial adaptor becuase it’s connected, if you unplug it the tty.PL2303-0000103D stops being listed.

Knowing the serial port, you can just type screen portname datarate to show the serial data on the screen. In my case, it was:

screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0000103D 9600

To quit the screen app, type control-A, then control-\.

Postscript

I don’t think that this is very complete, but it worked for me and might help you to get your USB serial working. Please let me know if there anything I can add to complete this piece.