CP2102, FT232RL + El Capitan, phantom devices - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: boneskull
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 07, 2015, 04:14:30 am
content: Hi,I apologize if this is not a good place to ask my question. If someone can recommend another resource, I'm all ears. I'm going to post this on the Apple forums as well.I'm having trouble with El Capitan andbothCP2102 and FT232RL USB-based devices. If, for some reason, the device does not disconnect cleanly from whatever it's attached to (I'm not sureexactlyhow this occurs), and I then disconnect the device from the Mac, I end up with a "phantom" or "zombie" USB device. It appears in my System Information. Console.app repeatedly reports:10/6/15 21:00:45.378 system_profiler: SPUSBDevice: IOServiceGetMatchingService did not return anything for location 0x141000000x14100000 is the previous location of the CP2102 or FT232RL device. The manifestation of this problem is that I cannot reconnect the device and have it appear as a port without attaching it to a different USB bus! That means if I want to use it, I need to put a hub between the device and the Mac. And ifthatfails, then I need another hub. And so on, and so forth.Of note:I have both of the latest drivers from Silicon Labs and FTDI.This was somewhat of a problem with Yosemite, but has become markedly worse after the upgrade.Google has no hits for this error message.Hoping someone can confirm or offer any best practices for using these things with Macs. Thanks!Chris

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2015, 05:06:29 am
content: I think it must be related to your Mac install. Its such a serious issue that if others were getting that problem it would be easy to find info on the problem.Ft232 and cp21xx are very common chipsets

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2015, 07:44:24 am
content: Quote from: Psi on October 07, 2015, 05:06:29 amI have a feeling most people with Macs are not really doing much in the way of hardware development.In Windows I know that sometimes phantom devices do show up in the device manager if their drivers are present but the device isn't plugged in, but they can easily be removed. You may want to investigate how to remove these entries from the device registry in OS X......or just use Windows instead.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2015, 08:44:38 am
content: CP210x & FT232RL are used in all sorts of retail computer peripherals.I can not accept that CP2102, FT232RL simply don't work correctly on mac's.

author: jc101
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2015, 09:18:34 am
content: Not exactly the same but I've been using an FT230X on a Mac which is on a dev board, it's been used a fair bit over the last few days and I'm on El Capitan too. I'm not seeing that, but I did get my first ever Kernel panic in the USB driver whilst using it to stream a heap of data out of the Mac.This was the errant module com.apple.driver.AppleUSBFTDI 5.0.0I don't have an FT232RL around to try, but I don't see anything like those errors in the logs anywhere.Note I haven't installed any FTDI specific drivers, just the ones which came with the OS.

author: bitseeker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2015, 01:45:37 am
content: I'm using FT232 and PL2303 USB-to-TTL interfaces OK on a MBP running Mavericks. Haven't upgraded to El Cap, yet.

author: zenman
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: November 20, 2015, 02:53:41 pm
content: boneskull-I am having the EXACT same problem, it's driving me slightly off my rocker.I'm developing on an esp8266 board using an ftdi232. The device is listed in the arduino IDE like normal for a little while, but what appears to be fairly randomly, if I disconnect and reconnect the usb, it is no longer listed in the ports. So far my only solution has been a reboot.The talk in the ESP8266 Arduino IDE community is to get a usb hub. I haven't tried that yet.

author: millers
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 12:15:59 pm
content: hey all! digging up an old thread because i recently started having this issue.Has there been any solid solution yet? I was originally blaming VM Ware because this started happening after VM Ware popped up trying connect my Arduino to the Windows VM. Is anyone else having the same issue running VM Ware?I'm using El Cap 10.11.5 beta

author: dadler
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 03:13:34 am
content: So, I have had a similar problem with Atmel-ICE and a few other USB devices on recent MacOS versions.I am not certain this is the same issue, but just in case I will attach the notes that helped me fix it.In my case, newer OSX versions give priority to the generic USB kext. My work around was a dummy device driver.You will have to substitute the productId/vendorId from your device in the plist, and probably rename Atmel-ICE to whatever you think is appropriate.If it's not the same problem, sorry-maybe it will help someone else.

author: millers
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 06, 2016, 08:37:14 am
content: Thanks dadler. Turns out i had an old version of drivers installed. I updated to the latest and it seems solid since. If i have any more issues i'll give your method a go