Reply To: pc and Mac unable to communicate with mayfly ver. 0.5b

If your Mac isn’t seeing the Mayfly as a USB device in your computer OS list of current devices, then you need to install the FTDI drivers from the device website at https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/

Mac and Windows 10 should automatically install those drivers whenever a Mayfly is connected to a computer for the first time, but sometimes company or school security software or configurations will limit the computers from automatically installing those drivers, requiring you to do it manually.

Once you’ve installed the VCP driver, your computer should see the Mayfly as a USB device and will assign it a COM port (or on a Mac it’ll give it a somewhat cryptic port designation as Beth showed above with the screenshot).  You shouldn’t attempt to troubleshoot communications issues with the Arduino IDE until you’ve confirmed that the computer can see the Mayfly.  And as Beth mentioned, many USB cable don’t actually contain all the proper data lines because they’re only a basic charging cable, or those pins in the connector or wires in the cable can get damaged or broken, causing there to be no communication.  I’d recommend trying a couple different cables (from different manufacturers) and different USB ports on your computer.  If none of those work, then try a different computer, if it’s still not being seen, then you might have damaged the USB cable on the Mayfly, in which case the only way to communicate with it is to buy a “CP2104 Friend” from Adafruit, solder 6-pin right angle header pins (male) to the end of it and connect it to the 6-pin FTDI socket on the Mayfly.  This bypasses the FT232RL FTDI interface chip on the Mayfly and allows you to program the board directly.

You don’t have to add the Mayfly to the Board Manager of the Arduino IDE if you simply want to view the serial output using the Serial Monitor of the IDE.  You only have to add the Mayfly support files to Board Manager if you want to program your Mayfly.  If your Mayfly is already programmed with any of our recommended sketches, it should be printing something to the USB port on startup, and usually during whatever loop it is running.  However, if you inherited this board from someone else, there’s no way to know what sketch is on it unless the Mayfly prints that information to the Serial Monitor.  Do you know what it was previously used for?