I am putting together a Netduino device, which I want to connect to my mac mini, and control it from the mac using Mono. So, the parts involved are
- Netduino (of course)
- OSX
- USB Host <-> USB Netduino
- serial COM port over USB
I have never done this before, and I have been reading about difficulty getting this sort of thing to work in Windows, so I am wondering if this is even possible on a Mac? My main concern, is that when I switch the Netduino to do debugging over RS-232 (leaving the USB free for data), this requires a driver on the host operating system that will support virtual COM ports? Is this correct? My concern is that this driver might not be available on OSX - I have no idea, but I thought I would ask the question - this is probably really obvious to somebody here.
To help my understanding, can someone point me to a link explaining what actually happens when configuring a Netduino to use the USB for data transfer? I am expecting something like this:
- Netduino is toggled to start up USB HID Virtual COM port driver on firmware reboot - hopefully you have connected RS-232 pins to PC so you can still debug the device...
- Connect Netduino USB to PC - this powers on the netduino and boots it, which starts the HID driver firmware. PC now detects the Netduino as an HID device
- PC queries Netduino for HID capabilities, Netduino responds with 'Virtual COM port'
- PC pops up the obligatory 'do you want to install this device' dialog box - and Windows already has a driver for this device type? The driver is happily installed.
- PC creates a COM port number (i.e. COM8, COM9, COM10 etc) to represent this device
- In your C# code, you can now open 'COM8' (or whatever) and it opens a channel directly to the netduino. If the netduino is running code listening on its own COM port (I assume it would probably be 'COM1' on the device) then a channel is achieved.
Thanks guys and gals.
Adam
