KHR and Mac

[TheJuggler]

Hi there,

I've been lurking for a while now, and gathering information before going ahead and buying a KHR-1HV kit to get myself into the world of bipedal roboteering.

One question I have to ask is whether anyone here has any experience in working with the KHR series using a Mac. All the documentation I have read required a PV with XP for the H2H software, and programming of the boards. Now, I'm a Mac user, having shed the nightmare of windows a long time ago. I do run Parallels on my mac meaning that I can run XP (and do have it installed).

So has anyone used the H2H on a Mac, running either parallels or bootcamp, or know if there's a Mac version of the SW that can be used?

Thanks in advance.

Neil

[Meltdown]

Both parallels or bootcamp will work no problem.
I do all my programming with HtH on either bootcamp or parallels.
I even got it working on an old G4 with virtual pc and a usb to serial adapter
I agree that it's a shame that there's no native HtH soft for Osx.

[TheJuggler]

Great news Meltdown. Thanks for the info.

[irina andrea]

Hi there,

Me too, I have a mac and I like to control the KHR-2HV from Mac OS X, but I had problems iinstalling the USB Serial Converter Driver does not create the virtual ports (should appear in the / dev) but its´n there.

The drivers is here http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm
Install Guide Mac OS X is here http://www.ftdichip.com/Documents/Insta ... _Guide.pdf

although I was disappointed to know that there isn´t H2H for mac, do not really need, the idea is to handle it from java but I need the driver installed correctly.


Has anyone tried to install the usb driver on Mac OS X?

[veltrop]

Two solutions:

1) You can use the USB-Serial adapter in Mac with the default FTDI drivers if you remove the EEPROM from it that contains the KONDO device ID's. When you open up the casing on the adapter, it is a 6 pin chip near the connector end, on the same side of the board as the FTDI chip. After removing the EEPROM, the FTDI device will go back to the default ID's and it's driver will register. Sorry, if I wasn't at work I'd post a picture

2) Modify the driver as this guy did (Japanese): http://capsule.brain.riken.jp/~tyam/ja/khrosx.html
Open up /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist with a text editor or plist editor and add this data to the list of products:
<key>Kondo Serial USB Adapter</key>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver</string>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>FTDIUSBSerialDriver</string>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOUSBInterface</string>
<key>bConfigurationValue</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>bInterfaceNumber</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>2</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>5724</integer>
</dict>

You should double check these Product/Vendor ID's in the IORegistryExplorer or from within Windows.

Of course without H2H, unless you are doing some home grown serial port code on the Mac side, getting the adapter to work there is pointless. (Though this does open the door to using WINE instead of VMWare/Parallels)

[chrisvo]

Another way: Just clear the vendor information for the EEPROM on the USB adapter. Requires no hardware or driver modification, and it will work just the same in Heart2Heart as before.

[silveranim]

hi chrisvo...
....your link is not ok.......can you check this please...
thanks

[chrisvo]

Sorry about the link. Basically, the EEPROM stores configuration information for the USB-serial adapter including customized vendor/product id numbers which Kondo put in there. You can clear it so that it acts like a "default" FTDI USB-serial adapter.

The easiest way is to use Windows tools to clear it if you have access to a Windows PC: FTDI released a graphical tool called FT_PROG which also lets you reprogram the firmware of the device. Basically look for the VID/PID configuration and clear it out to default. You don't have to mess with any other option.
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities.htm#FT_Prog

If you MUST use the Mac or Linux, use these steps:

1. download ftdi_eeprom
http://www.intra2net.com/en/developer/l ... wnload.php

2. obtain the VID/PID combination for your USB adapter. On the mac you can find this in the "System Profiler" which you can get to by going to the Apple menu at the top left-hand side of your desktop and choose "About this mac..." then click on "More info..." and then USB and find out what the VID/PID is.

3. Use that VID/PID information to tell ftdi_eeprom to erase the EEPROM (just read the instructions for ftdi_eeprom). You may have to do it more than once, sometimes it doesn't work the first time. Also, I'm pretty sure build of ftdi_eeprom on the Mac may not be easy because libftdi requires libusb, which doesn't come on the Mac. However, libusb, libftdi, and ftdi_eeprom all compile on the Mac, I have done it before.

[chrisvo]

P.S. Kondo has also posted an official guide for how to connect the USB adapter in Linux:

http://kondo-robot.com/sys/archives/2443

Their approach is to manually load the kernel driver using modprobe, passing in the custom VID/PID combination as parameters. To extend that, you could probably add something in /etc/modprobe.d or /etc/udev to automatically use these parameters when loading the ftdi-sio driver.

Note that you only need to use the ftdi-sio kernel driver if you want to access the serial port through /dev/ttyUSB*. There is an excellent userland library called libftdi which directly accesses the USB-serial device without the use of the ftdi-sio kernel driver, and a small library called libkondo4 which uses libftdi to provide a high level API that accesses the functionality of RCB4 / ICS3.

[silveranim]

hello chrisvo...many thanks for the additional information. it´s not easy for me to reprogramme the kondo usb device. now i will try the kondo official guide, i hope it works...

...why can´t I just buy a working Apple USB device from Robosavvy. It would be so much easier.