I’m a switcher and happily believed that everything Mac was simple. With that in mind I grabbed my GPS unit, connected it the Mac and …
Nothing, nada, zip. For some obscure reason I expect the GPS unit to mount just like any other device and then be able to browse it for tracks, waypoints and what-not. Maybe you can with newer units, but not mine. Also, I’m sure other people have had no trouble connecting the GPS to the Mac and will laugh at the hoops I jump through, but this was my experience with these ingredients…
Ingredients:
- Mac PowerBook G4, (1.67 Ghz PowerPC)
- Mac OS X 10.4.8
- Garmin eTrex (Yellow!)
- Serial to USB converter
Step 1:
Downloading the USB Serial Converter Driver.
I headed over to http://www.mct.com.tw/driver.html and grabbed myself the U232-P9M Driver. With the GPS unit unplugged I installed, probably restarted just to be sure, because old habits die hard. Plugged the GPS unit in and … error messages telling me the driver was funky, sigh. Time to throw the text from the error message into the search engine …
Step 2:
I managed to track down the following two lines of magic…
(which look a lot better when they’re no wrapped)
% sudo chmod -R og-w /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext% chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext… from macOSXhints.
I have no idea what they do, but that was all it took to get rid of the error messages and get the Mac to connect to the GPS unit.
That was me happy. It should be noted that this all took a couple of hours to get up and running, including the hunting round the internet times. Connecting to the PC took all of 30 seconds. Mac seems to get the short end of the stick when it comes to GPS, although that’s starting to change now.
Next up, now that the Mac can Talk GPS, how to get the info off the unit.
Hey, thanks for the great post. I’m in the same spot you are, recently converting back to a Mac and trying to get my GPS (eTrex Vista) up and running. I just wanted to see if the driver that you used was specific to the converter that you linked too. I have a TrippLite USB to Serial converter and just plugging it in I get not a thing, so I wondered if your solution might work out.
Thanks!
Hi John,
I think the driver is about as generic as it gets. Always worth a shot, let me know if it works, or you found some other way of getting life into it.
Things aren’t looking so hot driver wise for any USB to serial converter if you have one of the Intel Macs. There are drivers out for the FDTI chips if your converter happens to use those, which are pretty popular, you can get ahold of them here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm Until then I think I’m stuck emailing GPX files to myself from an old PC box with a real serial port.
Yup, the using a PC to get the track and sending it the Mac was how I initially had to do it.
Not very satisfying is it, kind of ruins the workflow.
Maybe I need to buy myself a new Intel Mac just to see how I get on :)
I got one of these working on my old G4 Powerbook but I was using a different USB serial port. Does the port show-up in /dev? usually as something like /dev/cu.serial-something
I’m having problems extracting the driver as mentioned in the original post. I’m using stuffit 10. Getting an “Error #17537″. are there any other extraction programs that might get round this?