USB-Serial Converters
Although there are many different USB to serial converters on the market, many of them are based on the same chipset.
Chipsets from different manufacturers may be of similar quality, but the OS X driver makes a huge difference to the reliability and usability of the interface converters.
The author has found converters based on the FTDI chipset are reliable and the driver works very well.
Here is a link to the FTDI driver
Converters based on the Prolific PL2303 chipset (such as the ATEN UC-232A) work OK but most OS X drivers found by the Author simply don’t work at all. Even if a working driver is installed, it is still a problem when multiple devices are connected to the same computer as the driver doesn’t create a unique name for each device (like the FTDI driver).
Here is a link to the PL2303 Prolific driver which has been tested by the author on OS X 10.7 and 10.8.
Chipsets from different manufacturers may be of similar quality, but the OS X driver makes a huge difference to the reliability and usability of the interface converters.
The author has found converters based on the FTDI chipset are reliable and the driver works very well.
Here is a link to the FTDI driver
Converters based on the Prolific PL2303 chipset (such as the ATEN UC-232A) work OK but most OS X drivers found by the Author simply don’t work at all. Even if a working driver is installed, it is still a problem when multiple devices are connected to the same computer as the driver doesn’t create a unique name for each device (like the FTDI driver).
Here is a link to the PL2303 Prolific driver which has been tested by the author on OS X 10.7 and 10.8.
