Tired of the /dev/tty.usbserial-XXXXXXXX address of the Bus Pirate? Piotr developed a utility to edit the EEROM in the FTDI chip on the Bus Pirate, this gives your Bus Pirate a consistent name on MacOSX. Grab the utility here, and follow this how-to submitted by Piotr. Thanks for the tip!
If you have a few FTDI USB devices in your system it might be confusing which /dev/tty.usbserial-XXXXXXXX points to the correct device, as the default isn’t very meaningful. Luckily with MacOSX and the FTDI USB to serial drivers there’s an easy way to change that!
The FT232R uses an internal EEPROM memory to store chip configuration. Programming it lets you change values such as PID, VID, Required Current, CBUS pins config, … and USB device description, which is what we want to change.
By default your Bus Pirate is detected as FTDI, FT232R USB UART with some random serial number like A600blSc. We can change it to anything, up to 46 ASCII characters, and get our device named the way we want. There are Windows tools for this available on FTDI Chip site, but there was none for MacOSX. Since playing with the EEPROM can render your FT232R useless, or at least make you unsolder it, I thought a simple tool which won’t let you break the device would be useful.
That’s why I wrote the Pirate Rename utility. It uses a modified open source library called libftdi-1.0 to talk to the FTDI chip and libusb-1.0.0. They are both embedded in the application bundle so you don’t need to worry about it.
Continue reading “Pirate Rename – Get a nicely named serial device”
