The Pharos GPS-360, OSX, and gpsd

The Pharos GPS-360 is actually a serial device (or so it seems), but the special cable it ships with contains a Prolific pl2303 USB to serial chip. These things are found in all kinds of USB products. If you plug this particular one in, you will find that it is recognized with Vendor 0x67B (which is prolific), but Product 0xAAA0. The normal product code is 0x2303 (how about that!) and this will produce an issue that needs to be solved later.

A nice chap has already gone down this road and prepared a life-saving detailed set of notes on how to make this work. The first thing to do is to get the OSX driver from the Prolific website, and install it on your macbook. It comes (as of this writing) as a ZIP file containing a DMG and a readme file. The install is the usual deal for OS X, use Finder to locate the dmg in question, double click on it, then double click on the icon that looks like an open cardboard box and follow along with the installer.

Now you have to fix that product ID business that was mentioned above. 

su
cd /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/Contents
vi Info.plist
You don't have to use vi, use whatever editor suits your fancy. The Info.plist file seems to be a bunch of XML. Find something that looks like: 
idProduct
8963
And change the 8963 to 43680. If the only prolific gizmo you ever expect to use is the Pharos 360, you are almost done, but you can be more clever and allow it to recognize Product ID 2303 and AAA0. To do this, you find the whole section tagged by 067B_2303, copy it and change the key to 067B_AAA0. So instead of changing 2303 to AAA0, you have just cloned that device and changed its product code.

Now, do this: 

kextload /System/Libarary/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/
Once this is done, you can look in /dev and you should find /dev/cu.usbserial. Given this, you can give gpsd a whirl. 
gpsd /dev/cu.usbserial
cgps
cgps is the "command line" client for gpsd.

Since you most likely won't enjoy hand loading this driver all the time, you want to make it happen automagically. This turns out to be simple, all you need to do is: 

su
touch /System/Library/Extensions





Feedback? Questions?
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Gtopo / tom@mmto.org