Sunday 13 March 2016

Connect BeagleBone Black and Mac OS X via Serial

In this tutorial we'll see how to connect the BeagleBone Black to a Mac OS X via serial communication.

First thing: connect the BBB to the host via the USB cable.
Then, for the serial communication, you need a USB serial connector like this:




Connect the pins in this way:


  • pin 1 = black wire (ground)
  • pin 4 = green wire
  • pin 5 = white wire



Now you have to identify the device from the host. In this step there may be some problems with the recognition of the board, so let's try the following steps.

Open the shell and type: ls /dev/cu.*
In addition to the USB port employed by the power supply for the board, you should see another port for the serial cable. 
If you don't, you have to install a suitable driver for recognize and access the serial device.

So type:  sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext
to remove any other installed driver and ther install one of the following (for me, it works with the first one):


Now, retry to type ls /dev/cu.*
You should see a  /dev/cu.usbserial between the results.

If so, the USB serial driver is working, so you can use this port name to connect with the board.
For this purpose, you can use minicom or another serial communication program.

If you need the serial connector, check this:
Usb To Ttl Serial Cable - To Connect Your Microcontroller, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Wifi Router Or Even Hard Disk. Serial Port Communication.

For BeagleBone Black:
BeagleBone Beagleboard Black - ARM Cortex A8, RAM DDR3, HDMI, USB 2.0




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