Connect Arduino Nano with Mac OSX

Thuc Le
3 min readFeb 20, 2016

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The guide is written with Mac OSX El Capitan, Arduino Nano V3 ( built by China ), Arduino IDE 1.6.5. Hope so it will be work with your situation.

The problem that I got is that the Arduino IDE in OSX El Capitan can’t upload the code to my Arduino Nano V3. In Arduino IDE, don’t have any port that is USB.

Arduino V3
Don’t have port to choose ( only have bluetooth in MacOS )

A little sad, but I try to check way to resolve this problem… Maybe it’s from the Driver of my OS that doesn’t support USB port of Arduino Nano.

My MacOS and Arduino IDE still work with Arduino Uno R3

When I checked the driver of Mac OS to work with Arduino Nano, I saw a link, you can download it from this. After download it, install it through CH34x_Install.pkg.

Install file through CH34X_Install.pkg

When installing was successful, open the terminal, run the command:

Run the script

Then, restart the Mac. Check the files in /dev/ with start name “tty*”, if you see /dev/tty.wch ch341 USB=>RS232 1420, it is correct.

Now, try to open the Arduino IDE, you will see the port /dev/tty.wch ch341 USB=>RS232 1420 in list

But when you try to upload the code to the board from Arduino IDE, you will get the error:

avrdude: ser_open(): can’t open device “/dev/cu.wch”: No such file or directory
ioctl(“TIOCMGET”): Inappropriate ioctl for device
Problem uploading to board. See http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Troubleshooting#upload for suggestions.

The reason is the name of serial port that used in Arduino is not support the space, ya. So, we need a trick with Arduino IDE. We need to replace the text -P{serial.port} to “-P{serial.port}” in 2 files:

  • /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/arduino/avr/platform.txt
  • /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/arduino/avr/programmers.txt
An example of replacement

. We need replace all cases in 2 files.
. Assume your Arduino IDE install in path /Applications/Arduino.app

Close and try to upload with Arduino IDE again:

Deploy successfully

And we are done :) . So, hope it’s useful for you and leave me your comment if any.

Summarize steps:

1. Download the driver from url: link

2. Extract and install file CH34x_Install.pkg

3. Run the command: sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1"

4. Restart the Mac.

5. Replace the text -P{serial.port} to "-P{serial.port}" in 2 files:
+ /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/arduino/avr/platform.txt
+ /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware/arduino/avr/programmers.txt

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