How-To: Connect a Serial Console to Your Mac

Computers & Mobile

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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@MattRichardson

August 10th, 2011 18

I don’t know about you, but there’s something that delights me about using old and new technology together. Things like USB typewriters, twittering Teddy Ruxpins, and PayPal-accepting vending machines just really make my day. This morning, I was gleeful to discover that Justin Ouellette hooked up an old VT220 serial console to his Mac running OS X Lion. On the hardware side, he used a USB to serial adapter, a null modem and a DB25 gender changer. After making a simple change under the hood in OS X, he was able to use the glowing yellow monitor to log into the command-line interface of his machine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m making my way over to eBay to find my own VT220 terminal. What better way to play Zork, am I right? [via Adafruit]