Newbie here -- spent last hour searching (no joy) then registering Here's my pain:
Mac OS X 10.4.11; brand new USB Diecimila card; fresh load of Arduino 11 and the USB drivers I've found mention of. Even though the card lights up and appears in System Profiler, the Serial Port option of the Tools menu of Arduino 11 is greyed out (ghosted) and can not be selected. Compiling and uploading the blink LED sketch results in the message "Serial post 'COM1' not found. Did you select the right one from the Tools > Serial Port menu?" I'd be happy to if the menu item worked!!!
My hunch is the preference file may need to be tweaked. I even found where the serial port is set to COM1 but I don't know what to enter for USB.
Try doing:
ls /dev/tty.*
from the Terminal. Do you see anything with usb in it? Try pasting that in place of COM1 in the preference file (the whole /dev/tty.... string).
Thanks, but no joy. "/dev/tty.usbserial-A600487i" is listed whenever the board is connected. Pasting it into the preferences did not enable the Serial Port menu and the IDE still can not talk to the board. The error message simply changed to saying it can't find /dev/tty.usbserial-A600487i rather than COM1.
Can you try uploading a sketch from another computer? In particular, try uploading, say, the ASCII Table example. Then, if it works, on your computer, run:
screen /dev/tty.usbserial* 9600
Do you see the output from the sketch?
Update: Still no joy. I found a reference somewhere about creating a symbolic link to the driver in /dev. That was done but nothing changed. The board lights up normally and System Profiler shows its presence but Serial Port is still grayed out.
It sure would be nice to hear from anyone who can bare witness to the board working in OS X 10.4.
Can you try uploading a sketch from another computer? In particular, try uploading, say, the ASCII Table example. Then, if it works, on your computer, run:
screen /dev/tty.usbserial* 9600
Do you see the output from the sketch?
Well... good news and bad news. I just completed loading everything on my OLD G3-400 and it CAN talk to the Diecimila. Blink and ASCII Table both ran fine so the card is proven OK. I left ASCII Table loaded on the card and moved it back to the MacBook Pro where it's needed and nothing changed. Serial Port is greyed out and the serial monitor will not even fire up. I believe the first couple console lines may hold the main clue:
java.lang.ClassCastException: gnu.io.RXTXCommDriver thrown while loading gnu.io.RXTXCommDriver
processing.app.SerialException: Serial port '/dev/tty.usbserial-A600487i' not found. Did you select the right one from the Tools > Serial Port menu?
My best guess at this point is something is still not right with the FTDI drivers. Unfortunately, the G3 must use the PPC driver while the laptop must use the Intel driver so it's not an exact matchup. Unless there's a better suggestion, I'll go through FTDI's instructions for removing the drivers and start over but that will have to wait for another day.
FTDI drivers are great - the best I've used on the Mac (mine are all PPC). I doubt it's the driver.
RXTX is the clue - you've probably got a rogue RXTX somewhere, causing problems with locking. I remember seeing this on the forums lately....
Arduino comes with a version of RXTX that has locking disabled. If a standard version is installed elsewhere it tries to use locking, and fails (due to permissions on the lock dir??).
Sorry, this is all from memory. I wasn't experiencing the problem, so I wasn't really paying attention to the issue...
I've followed the FTDI instructions for removing the driver and all its bits reinstalled FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_9_Intel.dmg from the drivers folder of arduino-0011.1 -- still no joy.
I've had similar trouble with the Java RXTX library. I've copied it to /Library/Java/Extensions for use into Eclipse (Target Management/Terminal/Serial) and the Arduino environnement became unable to access the serial port until it was completely removed.
So maybe you can try cleaning up your /Library/Java/Extensions folder, logging off/logging on again (not completely needed, but safer) and retry.
Don't forget to back up contents from this folder, as there may be other stuff which other programs may need.
Removing RXTXcomm.jar from Library/Java/Extensions did the trick. The magic was you gave me the full path to where RXTX lived. The Serial Port menu came to life and Life is Good. Blink works! ASCII Table works! I can finally start having some FUN with this.
This little thing (RXTXcomm.jar) has indeed a very strange behaviour, since when it's supposed to allow the Eclipse Terminal (part of Target Management Project) to connect to serial ports, it just have the same behavior within Eclipse than anywhere else : It can't connect to any port and just says it is busy or just non existing.
So, if anyone knows how to make this lib WORK on Eclipse, preferably without fucking up other apps, i would be really glad to hear from them
