Discussion: OR & OS Lion

I just received the following enquiry regarding trouble reading SI chips in OR using OS Lion. Does anyone have any ideas?

This is from Trail Sports, who are running the permanent orienteering course at the Canmore Nordic Centre. They are using a Keyspan adaptor to interface to the SI download station:

***********************
Since up dating to OS Lion on our Macs we have been unable to get the OR software to read chips. We have downloaded the latest drivers for the Keyspan adapter but still no luck.

With the new driver the OR software just quits.

Any insights?

John Gallagher
Owner / Manager
Trail Sports Inc.
(located at the Canmore Nordic Centre)

A bit more info - the Keyspan driver is a Beta (only thing available). Could it be that is not playing well with OR?

Can they read the chips in SI-Config?

They're running on a Mac, so I don't think SI-Config is an option (is it?)

Hmm, not sure about that part, since I never have done anything on a Mac. :)

If it doesn't start at all it could be a 64 bit / 32 bit problem. The native libraries for reading the SI master station are 32 bit. They need to run with a 32 bit Java VM. It could be that, after the upgrade, there is only a 64 bit JRE on the computer.

You could try installing a 32 bit JRE. Alternatively, try this version http://orienteering.ie/or/or64.jnlp. If it works, let me know as I don't have a 64 bit PC to try it.

Another thing that may be useful is to turn on the Java Console to see what error messages are printed. I have no idea how to do this on a Mac.

Martin

We still haven't sorted this out.

We are using a BSM-7-RS232 with a keyspan USB/Serial adaptor. I think the problem is that the Keyspan driver for the USB/Serial adaptor hasn't been upgraded (and no sign that it ever will be).

I thought we could try to use a BSM-7-USB but I don't think that there are any mac OS X drivers for that either.

Only potential solutions I can see:
1. get a different USB/Serial adaptor that support mac OSX 10.8.x
2. wait and pray that KeySpan or SI provide drivers for mac OSX
3. buy a Windows Netbook ;-(

Any other ideas or suggestions?

I seem to recall that the issue with the BSM-USB drivers is that the stock SiliconLabs drivers just didn't have the correct custom vid/pid pair that SI uses. I was able to make them work by manually editing the config file and reloading the driver.
There are lots of cheap prolific based usb -> serial bridges out there. Monoprice has some that I have used before.

rather than buy another laptop to just run windows, bootcamp your mac so it can run both windows and Mac. I use my Mac with OE software in windows mode as the battery life on my mac pro is far superior to windows laptops

I recently installed the latest driver for a Prolific serial-USB adapter (specifically, v3.4.48.272 (2/5/2013) for the Prolific PL 2303HXD chip), and had no luck with SI utilities (config/personal/boot), although an earlier version of the driver worked OK with these utilities (v3.4.36.247). I contacted SportIdent, their advice was use their equipment (article 30800). The problem seemed to be just with the SI utilities, as our event-management software (Autodownload) had no problem connecting to the download station when the latest version of the driver was installed (I didn't try it with OE).

Ed's advice might be worth pursuing if you can't get an earlier version of the driver.

Slightly off-topic - If anyone can offer advice on this problem, it would be appreciated: trying to install a printer driver for a Bixolon SRP-F310 splits printer on a pc running W7 professional 64 bit and getting error 0x00000002 part way through the install (after successful test print). Have been able to install successfully on numerous PCs running W7 64 bit (home and professional service pack 1), so it seems to be a specific PC problem.

Funny, I thought the workaround to install the USB driver under Mac OS was well known by now. Indeed you "just" have to install the Silabs driver and change the vendor id by editing a file (it's a bit hackish, perhaps someone could put an installer for that).

This is in the Geco faq, but it should work as well for Or:
http://sdenier.github.com/Geco/begin/faq.html

It works with 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8. Also it should run in 64 bits under Mac OS (Geco 1.x uses the SiReader provided by Martin, so it should work the same way)

You could use the SportIdent Mac OS X Driver Installer that comes bundled with the latest 4mila event software download: http://www.4mila.com/#!downloads (at least if you work with Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.8).