I have OSX El Capitan and the Arduino IDE has been working great with the native USB on an Arduino MEGA. But I need to program an ATTiny so I purchased an FTDI BASIC from Sparkfun --- and the "fun" began. The FTDI did not show up in the Tools/port menu although I could see it in Apple's System report as a USB device.
But this did not help. The installer reported success, but even after a restart, the FTDI did not show up in Arduino IDE. And the board did not show up in /dev, either. It's supposed to show up as something like tty.usbserial-A105BPJC and also cu.usbserial-A105BPJC. Since the devices were not showing, this means that the FTDI driver was not installed or was not running, so the IDE would not see the board anyway.
I then studied the FTDI literature and discovered that perhaps the Apple driver is conflicting with the FTDI driver since Apple has installed FTDI support. I did find the Apple driver in System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBFTDI.kext. But I was not able to remove it, even with a sudo operation in terminal. Fortunately, this was a red herring. A conflict is NOT the problem.
The solution is to move the FTDI driver which Arduino installed into the correct folder. I eventually found the Arduino-installed FTDI driver in Library/Extensions. Based on the date I could tell it had been installed when I installed the IDE app.
FTDI's thorough installation guide: Installation Guides - FTDI
shows that the kext drivers are supposed to be located in
System/Library/Extensions. A simple move (you have to use sudo in the terminal) solved the problem. Presto: FTDI board shows up now in the IDE.
Had the same problem.. Purchased a CP2102 adaptor to program esp8266 , worked straight out of the box, no problems. After a year of no joy this was the solution for me.
I'm not sure what the original poster was doing, since El Capitan does not have a directory named System/Library/Extensions. So, I have no idea where to move the files to or why you would need to.
I think the OP fixed his problem by backing out the mistake he made by installing them in the first place since you shouldn't have to do anything to have FTDI chips work in OSX, they're there in NOOBS (new-out-of-box-software).
IMO, Using SUDO to install drivers on OSX is suicide. Things can get real ugly by disabling SIP and then
SUDO'ing something into your machine that shouldn't be there in the first place. Then, what do you do? The challenge becomes finding where stuff was installed and ripping it back out. A royal PIA.
If it doesn't have a properly behaved installer, or if I cannot install it with HomeBrew, it ain't going on my Mac - unless I know where it came from and why I need to install it without SIP in place. There is a sound reason why Apple made the kernel rootless...
Thanks for the warning, Fred. I happen to have the same problem. The installer placed the FTDI driver in /Library/Extensions, but Arduino IDE doesn't recognize it. Apparently the IDE is looking for it in /System/Library/Extensions
My version of El Capitan has both:
/Library/Extensions
/System/Library/Extensions
See attached screenshots.
How can I force the installer to place the driver in /System/Library/Extensions ?
I had some time to dig a little deeper in this. I think I must have been asleep when I posted that El Capitan didn't have a /System/Library/Extensions directory. Doing a search that 1) includes system files and 2) files containing "ftdi" and that 3) end with the extension "kext" turns up only one matching file on my machine:
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBFTDI.kext
I've re-read the original post about what needed to be done but I cannot tell if he actually ended up having done anything at all in the end. Further, re-checking the FTDI documentation says that in only rare instances would you need to remove the Apple drives and install the FTDI VCP's. The bottom line is that you cannot have two drivers in the same directory as the OP's says he thinks he did.
I'm calling nonsense on the original post and ultimately, he got things working the same way you did - by rebooting. The reason: SIP. Unless you disable SIP, which requires a reboot into recovery mode, entering an obscure command via terminal mode and rebooting again, you cannot remove the original Apple drivers - even with sudo as this simply promotes the user to root status - but with SIP in place, the system does not recognize root. The result? Nada. Drivers still there, as they should be.
have tried many things starting from disabling default driver to reconnecting Arduino module and restarting mac many times.