No serial-over-USB connection to expansion board

[paul12345]

I am unable to communicate with my new Wipy + expansion board over USB. I am able to connect to its wifi network successfully. I have verified that the 4 UART lines of code are in boot.py, and I have also checked that the jumpers are all installed (presumably forwarding a UART terminal to an FTDI chip on the expansion board). Pycom has not published a schematic of the expansion board so I can't tell what FTDI chip is being used, but I have also installed the latest VCP drivers, rebooted, played around with kextunload/kextload and still I cannot see the device in /dev/tty*<usb?>

I have tried multiple USB cables, multiple computers with two different OSX operating systems (El Cap and Sierra), and none of them show a serial connection over usb. I think someone needs to post instructions for Macs to connect over USB since it is not going very smoothly.

[bucknall]

@paul12345 Hi Paul, could you post a picture of your WiPy + expansion board in the setup that you are using? It might give us an idea as to what the problem is!

[paul12345]

@bucknall

Thanks for the response. I bought the following WiPy and expansion board from Adafruit:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/3338
https://www.adafruit.com/products/3344

As explained above, I am able to connect wirelessly but not wired over USB. I tried two recent OSX MacBooks and neither show any /dev/tty.USB entry as far as I can tell.

[bucknall]

@paul12345 instead of /dev/tty.USB try typing -

ls /dev/cu.*

This should list your serial usb devices on Mac. You can then connect to it using;

screen *YOUR_SERIAL_USB_DEVICE* 115200

Let me know how you get on with this!

[paul12345]

@bucknall

I believe I tried that as well and didn't see any entries named as such, but I will try again tonight and report back.

[bucknall]

@paul12345 Have a look at the headers on the expansion board, sometimes they fall off in transit and will mean your WiPy can't transmit/receive over USB Serial.

You'll want to make sure the TX and RX headers are there!

[cvp]

@paul12345 Try ls /dev/tty.*

[paul12345]

@bucknall

Thanks everyone for the help. Yes, I already had the jumpers installed. I found that it was just (both!) micro USB cables that I was using previously: I think both were from charging-only electronics and were not complete USB cables. Trying a third cable, I now see the board mount and can start up the terminal using at least one of the two mount targets:

ls /dev/*usb*
/dev/cu.usbserial-<serialnumber> /dev/tty.usbserial-<serialnumber>

[bucknall]

@paul12345 Brilliant! I'm glad you're up and running with your WiPy now :)

[shariq]

got similar error, my expansion board doesnt show as recognized