macOS 10.15.4 Catalina and FTDI

Posted on
Mon Mar 30, 2020 8:50 pm
boisy offline
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macOS 10.15.4 Catalina and FTDI

Hi all,

I am currently running Indigo 7.4.1 on a Mac Pro running 10.13 and the FTDI serial driver, using the method documented to bypass the built-in Apple supplied FTDI driver for that platform using the instructions found here.

For some inexplicable reason, the device sometimes just disappears. It's actually gotten worse lately, and I'm ready to move my Indigo installation over to a Mac Min running 10.15.4.

Apple has started supplying a new DriverKit-based FTDI serial driver in Catalina. Has anyone tried it with the Insteon 2413U to see if it works well? Apple is wanting us to move away from installable 3rd party drivers, and I'm hoping that the issues that the Apple-supplied FTDI driver in earlier version of macOS have finally be resolved.

Posted on
Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:47 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: macOS 10.15.4 Catalina and FTDI

It's working here on a variety of Macs: 2012, 2014, 2018 Mac minis and a 2015 MacBook Pro. Note that we've had anecdotal evidence that doing a clean install, with no potential cruft being brough along with a Time Machine (or Migration Assistant) restore seems to fix problems that some have seen. I know it's a HUGE pain to recreate a system manually (I just had to do it because Apple screwed up my backup when I used it briefly with Catalina and decided I needed to go back to Mojave) and of course YMMV.

I believe there was at least one report of it not working on Catalina, but I can't seem to find that at the moment so I might be misremembering...

IMO, Catalina is never going to be a stable, reliable release, so I've decided to just bypass it for everything except testing. I really did give it a try, but there were just too many issues. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts (which, scarily, is exactly what my reaction has been to Windows when trying to switch in the past). I'm really just hoping that Apple chooses to focus the next release on stabilizing macOS and less on foundational and functional changes.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Tue Mar 31, 2020 12:22 pm
boisy offline
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Re: macOS 10.15.4 Catalina and FTDI

Thanks Jay. That's good to know.

BTW, it looks like my 2413U somehow got corrupted. I had to reset the PowerLinc and sync all links. I'm not sure how that happened, frustrating for sure.

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