• Introduction – What Is CH340G?

CH340 Chip

Recent versions of cheap Chinese clones of Arduino boards have been coming with a different USB/Serial chip, which replaces the usual FTDI. I read somewhere that licensing costs of FTDI make it prohibitive to companies selling boards for as little as $3, so I assume this is the main motivation.

Below you’ll find links to drivers for both Windows and Mac to make these work.

Windows

A fully signed drivers for Windows can be found below. Also a tutorial for Windbloze here.

Mac OS-X

Mac OS-X Sierra

Mac OS-X El Capitan

Many instructions down below were written for the old driver, which was not signed, and therefore was not working out of the box on OS-X Yosemite and El Capitan. The latest driver appears to be signed, and should work out the box. The new driver is here: CH34x_Install.zip (111Kb).

Acknowledgements: thanks to Björn’s Techblog for posting the driver.

Inside the driver is a brief README with the following instructions:

Driver README

CH34X USB-SERIAL DRIVER INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS Version: V1.0 Copyright (C) Jiangsu Qinheng Co., Ltd. Support System: OSX 10.9 and above

Installation Process: * Extract the contents of the zip file to a local installation directory * Double-click CH34x_Install.pkg * Install according to the installation on procedure * Restart after finishing installing

After the installation is completed, you will find serial device in the device list(/dev/tty.wchusbserial*), and you can access it by serial tools.

If you can’t find the serial port then you can follow the steps below:

  1. Open terminal and type ‘ls /dev/tty*’ ande see is there device like tty.wchusbserial;
  2. Open ‘System Report’->Hardware->USB, on the right side “USB Device Tree” there will be device named “Vendor-Specific Device” and check if the Current is normal. If the steps upper don’t work at all, please try to install the package again.

Note: Please enter System Preferences ➜ Security & Privacy ➜ General, below the title “Allow apps downloaded from:” you should choose the choice 2 ➜ “Mac App Store and identified developers” so that our driver will work normally.

Source :
Björn's Techblog, Driver information source, Windows tutorial