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Connect to serial port on mac

Macs are supposedly well known for being able to just work with serial ports

In my professional opinion there are 2 simple systems we can use to connect to Serial ports on Mac

  • Minicom
  • screen

First we need to find the serial device

Locate the serial device

Open your terminal and navigate to /dev

cd /dev

List all the tty devices

ls /dev/tty.*

Hopefully there will be a device like /dev/tty.usbserial-<> where <> are letters and numbers

Make a note of the fill path of that device. We will need this later

Here's where you get to chose your own adventure

Specific Setup

First we need to configure Minicom to use the correct device and Baud rate

For your Baud rate, see if it's listed in the Useful Baud rate section, otherwise check your vendors user manual that you threw away because you're a man, and you don't need to manual (spoken by a man who threw away their manual)

minicom -s

You will see an interface like the below

minicom main menu

Use the Down arrow key to select Serial port setup then press enter

Your page will now look like this

minicom serial config menu

Press the key a on keyboard, then paste in the path to the serial port.

Press enter to exit once configured.

Then press e and you'll get an interface like the below

minicom baud rate

Press the letter c for 9600 or the letter e for the 115200 baud rate

Once done, press enter to get back to the main menu

Select Save setup as dfl

Quality of life changes

These changes are entirely optional, but make using minicom easier on a mac

At the main menu screen, select Screen and keyboard then press enter

Press the a key to selext Command key is

minicom screen and keyboard config

Now press Control + a

Press enter then select save setup as dfl

You can now exit minicom, and then at your terminal type minicom and you'll be presented with a terminal console on your device

Screen is the simpler of the setups

To open the Serial connection we run

screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A907OLI1 9600

where 9600 is the Baud rate. See the Useful Baud rate section on some vendor specifics

Usefull Baud rates

Vendor Name Rate
Cisco (most commonly) 9600
Juniper 9600
Mikrotik 115200
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