Getting Aten UC-232A usb-to-serial dongle to work on OS X "Snow Leopard"

Posted by: admin  :  Category: Hardware, Networking

Murphy stroke again. This time he crushed my RS232 USB-to-serial dongle, which used to work fine on my MacBook Pro running OS X.

I use a very basic Aten UC-232A dongle. There exist various variations out there, but most of them contain a PL-2303 chip, so despite some of them looking very different in design they’re basically the same thing.
Obviously mine stopped working after upgrading from OS X 10.5.x to 10.6.x “Snow Leopard”.

Looking for alternate drivers I came along a few sites, including some driver update pages which requered me to pay for it.
Oh wait a minute … paying for a device driver? Gosh … get lost!

I then found this site which actually has some drivers.
I though that the MAC OS10.x Intel Base driver would work, but it didn’t. Checking with the sudo kextstat command in an OS X Terminal would show, that it was never to get loaded.

Looking furtger, I found PL2303 USB to Serial Driver for Mac OS X at SourceForge. Giving it a try I sound found, that it wouldn’t work for me, neither.

But reading through the forums of that project I found an interesting reference to another PL2303 project site at github.com.
There I found an indeed working PL2303 driver for OS X Snow Leopard.
I keep a copy of this driver hosted at this blog, just in case that it disappears one day from github.

After installing the updated driver Snow Leopard immediately recognized the dongle and added it to network device list.
Following that, the new “PL2303-” serial port was then selectable in ZTerm to work with.

Well, thank you guys, for getting this driver to work on OS X. You saved my day!

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