Arduino Nano serial port not recognized on Mac 10.12

John Strong of StrongWare sent me an Arduino Nano to experiment with, and I was puzzled when it would not appear as a Port in the Arduino IDE. All I could select was “dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port”.

I never had to install special drivers for Arduino on Mac before (but do on a PC) but I did some searching and decided to try the FTDI drivers (most recent release from 2015). No luck.

I then decided to try my UNO. I couldn’t find it, and had to open a brand new one up. It was also not recognized.

After some searching, I found out that many clone Arduino are using a different USB-to-Serial chip, and need special drivers. The “official” ones (from a Chinese website!) cause a kernel panic due to a bug in the current release.

I found this:

https://github.com/adrianmihalko/ch340g-ch34g-ch34x-mac-os-x-driver

These drivers work and I now can use this clone Arduino Nano:

Arduino Nano visible using replacement CH serial drivers.

I hope this helps someone else not waste an hour like I had to tonight to find this ;-)

4 thoughts on “Arduino Nano serial port not recognized on Mac 10.12

  1. Pingback: Arduino and the Texas Instruments SN76489 | Sub-Etha Software

  2. eriel marimon

    Hi. After installing said drivers, my nano still does not show up on `/dev` . The board is in working conditions since it works fine on a windows computer. I tried Versions 1.4 and 1.5 of the drivers in the Github repo. Any ideas why still isn’t detected? I have the Latest Mac OS (whatever the name is) and only USB-C ports available. Thanks

    Reply
    1. Allen Huffman Post author

      What serial chipset does your Arduino use? FTDI should be built in. Mine used that odd China one. They have official drivers that work on their website now, though, so I’m not sure what the github folks are doing with their mirror.

      Reply
  3. Pingback: Arduino and the Texas Instruments SN76489 | Sub-Etha Software

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