How to find the serial port number on Mac OS X?

Question

I have just started experimenting with Serproxy and Arduino to get some serial data into Flash Builder/Flex. Serproxy seems to work fine and seems to connect to whatever port is specified. However, I am not able to see or read any data from the serial port using ActionScript. This is odd, because the Arduino should be printing data on a loop.

The only thing I can think of is that I am not setting the correct serial port number. I have been trying to figure out how to find out what number should be set, that is, 5331, 5332, 5333, etc.

How do I find out the port number? Is there a way to do this using Terminal on OS X maybe?

Solution 1

You can find your Arduino via Terminal with

 ls /dev/tty.*

then you can read that serial port using the screen command, like this

screen /dev/tty.[yourSerialPortName] [yourBaudRate]

for example:

screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A6004byf 9600

Solution 2

Try this: ioreg -p IOUSB -l -b | grep -E "@|PortNum|USB Serial Number"

Solution 3

I was able to screen using the device's name anyway so that wasn't the issue. I was actually just trying to find the port number, i.e. 5331, 5332 etc. I managed to find this by a trial and error process using an app called TCP2Serial from the app store on Mac OS X. It isn't free but that's fine as long as I know it works!

Worth the 99c :) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tcp2serial/id506186902?mt=12

Solution 4

mac os x don't use com numbers. you have to use something like 'ser:devicename' , 9600

View more solutions

Comments

[Dimme]

There are not so many port numbers? In my case you can easily see which is the port number for the arduino: imac: username$ ls /dev/tty.* /dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync /dev/tt‌​y.usbserial-A4001sy9

[jwilleke]

But what is the serial com port number? com1, com2, com8, etc?

[Automatico]

This is very nice, but how is this translated into the name in /dev/?

[Davide]

Any solution about this translation?

[Deqing]

It seems doable manually, each port has a port number, and its parent, grandparent ... , each has a port number too. If you join the number together, you get a subset of your serial port. Not sure what is the best way to do it programmatically to parse the tree.