MCP2200 not recognized on a mac/OS X

So, I've completed construction of a Gen7 1.5 board as part of a project at my local makerspace to build a big new printer. It's a MendelMax variant that's been overgrown to have a 12" x 12" x12" build volume in case anyone is curious.

Anyway, the board powers up, I got the naked Atmega1284P programmed with a bootloader and then the test firmware via the ICSP header, so that's all groovy.

I thought there was a problem with the MCP2200 chip, though, because I couldn't get the board to show up in the OS when I plugged it into my Mac via USB (Macbook Pro i5, OS X 10.6.something). I troubleshot the thing from stem to stern and pulled my hair out for a while until I plugged it into a PC and the board showed right up. I then did some digging and found these errors in the dmesg log:

0 0 AppleUSBCDCACMControl: start - Failed to find the CDC driver
0 1 AppleUSBCDCACMData: start - Find CDC driver for data interface failed

So it seems my Mac isn't recognizing the device because of a driver issue. That actually made me feel a lot better. I checked the downloads area at microchip.com and they only have a driver for Windows; supposedly Mac and Linux will work with the CDC ACM driver? Except not in my case, at least.

Is anyone else using the Gen7 1.5 board with a Mac? Any issues getting it recognized by the OS? I can certainly use a PC in the short term but since this is going to be a shared printer at the Makerspace I'd rather have it work with anyone's platform of choice. I realize this issue is a bit more of an OS/driver problem than a Gen7 dev question but I since I've already dug all over the internet for information on this sort of problem, I don't want to overlook the possibility that someone here has already run into this and solved it.

Thanks,
Jeff

P.S. - Traumflug - thank you for all of your work. The Gen7 board is really something.

Excellent diagnosis!

Yes, Linux uses the universal CDC driver, no custom drivers required. It shows up as /dev/ttyACMx

Googling around a bit brings up two posts: one hinting on the MCP2200 being not supported on Mac OS X 10.6.5: [www.microchip.com] and another one hinting to work fine on 10.6.8 and 10.7.2: [www.mikrocontroller.net]

What is your version of Mac OS X?

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Hi Traumflug,

I'm running 10.6.8. I found that first article, though I couldn't get very far along that same path because the problem I'm having seems to happen before the device is created in /dev/xxxx. When I get back to the shop later, I'll try running the USB Probe app referenced in the forum post and see if that provides any useful data.

Maybe I should try plugging it into a different mac in case I've got some strange problem with the universal driver on my machine. All the other macs I have are running older versions of OS X, though.

-Jeff

No support for not-so-old Macs would be disappointing. Last resort would be to hook up another USB-TTL converter; the required pins are on the extension board header. I hope you find a better solution, though.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Well, I haven't given up. I'll grab the board tonight and bring it home where I can plug it into a couple of other Macs and see what happens. Also, one of the forum links you provided above is a discussion forum on the chip manufacturer's website; if I can't take this any further on my own, I'll start a thread over there and see if I can get some official support.

It also might be that there's just something about that chip that doesn't fit within the parameters of the universal driver in OS X, and maybe there's a hack (config file, kext, whatever) I can make somewhere to recognize it.

If I have to use a USB -> TTL converter, will that only allow me to program it, or will that replace the USB interface entirely and allow me to actually send print jobs to the board?

Thanks again,
Jeff

Gen7 v1.4.1 used to use an external USB-TTL converter. Same functionality as the internal one. And let's cross fingers they don't disturb each other without interrupting the tracks to the internal one.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Just a quick update, i haven't made any new progress on getting the board to work with the Mac, but I have successfully pushed the bootloader and Marlin using the Arduino IDE from a PC after installing the Windows driver provided by Microchip. So that means a couple of things - most importantly, our board lives! But also, that pretty much clinches the fact that my issues connecting from my Macbook is a driver issue. Which is okay - we can work around it for now, and a driver issue should be solveable.

I might not get back to this for a week or two because we REALLY want to button up this printer for a local maker event on the 24th and so that's my focus for now, but I do eventually want the printer to work cross-platform so I'll definitely be returning to work on this issue some more. I figure eventually someone else will have the same problem and want the solution...

Anyway, thanks again for the help Traumflug, and thank you very much for all your work in developing this board in the first place. Representing our printer build team at the makerspace, I can say the mission of creating a capable, DIY-able board was definitely a success. Everybody is really excited over here about being able to construct our printer from top to bottom, and not having to buy a commercial control board is a big part of that.

-Jeff

the MCP2200 does not work with macosx. Microchip states this and therte are threads on how to get it to work with linux. as for windows there are some issues with the 64 bit version of windows 7 but there are workarounds for this.
terramir

An update on this one, for those finding this thread by Google:

The MCP2200 is fully supported since Mac OS X 10.7, see [ww1.microchip.com]

The USB-Serial converter is actually supported a lot earlier, but the protocol ("IAD") detecting this serial capability is not. One has to resort to custom software to access serial, still one can see the chip when looking into Mac OS Xs hardware listing (Apple menu -> About this Mac -> More Information -> Hardware -> USB (tested on 10.4.11)).

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

OK, I couldn't resist to keep my trusty iBook. To connect an old Mac OS X to a modern Gen7, I wrote the mcp2200-forwarder tool. Keeping this running in the background, one can connect to the printer just as if the OS would support the MCP2200: [reprap.org]

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY