This really is a hobby made up of hobbies. And as is almost always the case, I have found ways to complicate things and tread on ground that either is seldom traveled or more easily avoided for most.
See, I used to do a lot of audio editing and recording on GNU/Linux based systems back in the late 90s/early nils. There was no more difficult way to get audio into or out of a computer. The list of hardware providers was slim and the software was almost all roll your own. Which is great if you want to spend time messing around with stuff instead of doing the thing you want to do.
Then I had kids. And I went full-bore into the Mac world. No debates. For my use cases, everything works fine. I don’t have to deal with a lot of system overhead and when I really need to step out of bounds, I drop to the command line and do my work quickly.
Which brings me here. To Ham Radio and the Mac. Which don’t go together as nicely as I’d like.
So much software is Windows only and there is more support for GNU/Linux systems than there is for the Mac. When I want to do something simple, I often get bogged down. More often than not, I have to roll up my sleeves and do a little work to save myself time down the road.
I use Alfred. And by use I mean that I’m absolutely useless on my computer without it. It’s a launcher that has workflow capabilities. What’s that mean? Simple. I can write scripts and execute them with keystrokes from anywhere in the OS. My first silly project was to get a simple callsign lookup using QRZ and their XML lookup. So I put together a workflow and now I can invoke the lookup and see Callsign, Grid Square, State, City, Country, and Name in giant print.
That was pretty simple to do and I’ve used it many times since I developed it.
But back to the problem at hand. I use an ICOM IC-7100 which I still think is the best first radio for a ham if they can afford it. It has allowed me to get on local nets and do plenty of HF work including digital modes like FT8 with no additional hardware. It’s also nice and portable for field work out of the Jeep.
Getting it to work on the Mac required a lot of driver nonsense to get the USB devices set up. See what I said there? DeviceS. The IC-7100 identifies as two distinct devices. One is for audio and the other handles the CAT control of the rig. ICOM even defines them for you in the drivers. There is “IC-7100 02008919 A” which handles the CAT control elements and “IC-7100 02008919 B” which is the audio interface. Easy enough. Or it should be.
The thing is, every time you power on the unit, the Mac rediscovers it and assigns it a new device handle at the BSD layer. Which means you get something like:
/dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART
/dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART8
Two devices means two entries. But that trailing 8 on the second one? It changes every time the device is discovered. That means that every time the rig is turned off and on again, that number changes. It goes up by 2s until reboot in my experience. The other problem is that the A and B interfaces mentioned above aren’t assigned consistently. So more often than not, I get a failure immediately when I launch WSJT-X because the trailing number on the device identifier has changed OR the A interface was assigned the device identifier without a number when it had it before.
There’s no way to defeat this at the OS level. I’ve tried. If you have a way to do it, shout! In the mean time, I did a dumb workflow that runs a simple python script and displays which interface is assigned to A. How did I do it? Easy.
Install pip if you haven’t got that running on your system.
Install pyserial
Run this at the command line:
python -m serial.tools.list_ports "IC-7100 02008919 A" -q
Now, because I’m a fancy guy, I put it into Alfred so I can get this on my screen:
Total time on the solution for this was…much longer than it should have been. Digging around for a way to tie a device description to the /dev entry took way too long as the pyserial option didn’t exactly boil to the top with the way I was searching. That said, the actual implementation was about 10 minutes of work. Following the above instructions if you have a Mac with Python on it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
So I’m putting this here in case there is another nut like me out there. The adventures in the hobby of hobbies continues!