So fire up the windows machine and open portal.  You should see something like this.

Once here click the command button disconnect button (if you are connected to the bridge).  See below:

Next, we need to get to the command prompt to enable the RF Engine to act like an VCP (Virtual COM Port).  See Image below.

Enter the command:
root.setup_usb_as_vcp()
And then hit enter.  Your Windows machine should make the sound of an USB device being unplugged then plugged in.  Your RF Engine is now setup to be used as a Virtual COM Port.  If you want this to work now in your Windows enviroment you need to download the Silabs VCP driver for your flavor of windows.  Or you can re-enable the RF engine in USB mode by issuing the:
root.setupSynapseUsb()
Command.

Now you are ready to move to the Mac platform.  So take your USB Stick + RF engine and plug it into your mac.  Nothing happens… So you need to download the Silabs drivers for OSX.  So go here and scroll down to the Mac section.  Download / Run them like any other osx application.  Next open a terminal and type:
ls /dev/cu.*
You should see something like this I assume.

The /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART is what we are after.  So copy this and fire up Portal.

***Make sure you rebooted after you installed the OSX Silabs VCP drivers of this will fail!

Now click the connect button and you should see something like this above.  Just paste in the /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART (or whatever it looks like on your setup) and it should connect.

Today I got home from my day job and found at small package with custom stamps all over it.  Needles to say this was the V3 Bus Pirate that I orded about 3 – 4 weeks ago.  After I took it out of the package I wanted to test it out a bit.  Kicked on the Macbook Air and hooked it up.  The quick and easy way to connect to the Bus Pirate V3 via OSX is just to do this:

screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A600aSlz  115200

After that you should see something like this: (If you don’t see anything just hit enter a few times)

Once there I typed in capitol M and it quickly displayed a listing of supported protocols seen here:

So just push something like 9 <enter> and it will change the mode of the bus pirate to PC KEYBOARD mode.  Very cool stuff.  Will blog more on it after my work on the contraptor.org project for the lightning talks @hacdc is over.

ril3y