Mac 10.7.2 USB 2 Serial Problem

[alex2035]

I was comissioned an instalation of OCPN with charts and GPS connection through NMEA on a Macbook Air that runs Lion 10.7.2 on 64 bit.

OCPN 2.6.1223 runs fine with CM93 and raster charts. The problem is that I cannnot manage to see NMEA through the USB converter. I did a succesful install some days ago on another Mac but it was system 10.6.x something, everything worked OK.

The driver for PL2303 (Prolific USB chip) says its compatible with 10.6.x and Lion 32/64 bit, but I think it is not, usbserial appears OK on a terminal, everything is identified on System Profile. light on the USB shows the incoming NMEA stream, etc.

But neither GPS Utility nor OCPN are showing any NMEA data.

Has someone over here been able to make this work?

Thanks for any help. alex

[prof_mariner]

Did you configure the GPS setting (it's called "NMEA data source") in the OpenCPN configuration?

[alex2035]

yes, first thing, usbserial, on OCPN and GPSUtility, as per all instructions and system profiling. I made some searching, found out it was a common problem for 10.7.2 , in fact official Prolific driver that "say" they work on 10.7 they dont on 10.7.2 so there are some special builds of them by devs going around. I have downloaded some which I will try today, If I make this work will post results so it might serve any other users with this.

[alex2035]

I can report I made this work today with drivers from failberg, osx-pl2303-0.4.1-failberg.pkg found on GIT> https://github.com/failberg/osx-pl2303/downloads
the 0.5 beta version didnt do, but 0.4.1 worked fine. it is for all usb2serials compatible with Prolific chip. 32 and 64 bit.

[alex2035]

I thought I wrote one final note on this to help some others that come across similar situation. I went on board to install and configure the whole setup. Raymarine C90Wide plotter, set of ST60 instrumentation , NMEA black box (Seatalk2NMEA converter) and Macbook Air 10.7.2 Lion with Prolific USBtoSerial tied with the box.
At first OpenCPN would hang up needing to Force quit every time. I did some probes to discard either OCPN or something in the NMEA stream. Finally found something on the NMEA coming from the box was conflicting, so I started with only an RMC,RMB stream. then added Wind, Depth and Speed data from instruments. Lots of unneeded strings I left out, with this everything started to work like charm.
Finally I sent waypoints and routes to C90 and they where delivered as expected. With this setup working perfectly we got rid of the SanDisk and CF card tied with Raytech Planner, which is a real hassle. OpenCPN looks great on a Mac I must add, and now I am working on Plotter Sync to do an iPad to the C90 connection but that involves a router and some hacking.