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Mac Access with Serial Keys
Step 1: The Hardware
Those nice people at Microsoft provide special software with Windows
machines that lets you use your Pathfinder as an alternative keyboard.
Those equally nice people at Apple don't! They DO have a Control Panel
feature called "Easy Access" that helps, but you can't just
plug your device into a Mac and have the Mac say "Hey, that's cool
- a new keyboard for me to recognize!!"
Just to make things a little more challenging, the good people of Apple
decided some years back to do away with something called the Serial Port
(the little round plug socket at the back of the Mac) and use something
else called a USB - Universal Serial Bus (a thin rectangular plug socket
at the back of the Mac). Of course, all those folks out there who were
already using the Serial Port to connect their communication aids to the
Mac with suddenly found that the definition of the word "universal"
had changed.
However, all is not lost. It IS possible to connect your Pathfinder
with a Mac that has a USB port by getting hold of something called a "Serial-USB
Adapter." Here's a picture of one from a company called KeySpan:
When you get your Pathfinder, you should also receive an MTI (Memory
Transfer Interface) cable which has a nine-pin plug at each end. You connect
one of these to your Pathfinder and the other to your Serial-USB Adapter.
Then you plug the flat plug on the Serial-USB Adapter. into your Mac.
Tadahh!! You are now physically connected to your Mac. But that's not
the whole story because your Mac doesn't recognize the Pathfinder yet.
All it know is that there's a plug in the USB port but has no clue as
to what that plug is attached to. So you now need to tell your Mac about
Pathfinder.
That's when you use the Serial Keys software.
Step 2: The Software
The Mac is a pretty smart machine and open to new suggestions. The "new
suggestion" we want to make is "How about letting me use the
Pathfinder as an alternative keyboard?" To do this, you need to run
a special piece of software on your Mac called "Serial Keys."
When Serial Keys is running, it tells your Mac to be on the lookout
for information from anything connected that uses "serial data."
It doesn't matter if you don't know what "serial data" is, just
that the Pathfinder has it! So when you press a key on the Pathfinder,
the Serial Keys software tells the Mac what has happened and the Mac acts
on it.
Obviously you need to have a copy of the Serial Keys software to do
this. And because I'm basically a nice guy, you can get a copy right here,
right now!
This software is zipped, so you need to unzip it before using it on
your Macintosh. Go to my page on "zipping and unzipping" if
you need help.
Step 3: Making the Software work
I just said that I am basically a nice guy. However, I am also basically
a lazy guy and hate to do work when I don't have to. The folks at the
TRACE Center have actually
put together a ton of information about Serial Keys, more than I can copy
to my site. So you need to link to the TRACE Site for all the information
you will ever need about Serial Keys.
Step 4: Sending stuff from the Pathfinder to the Mac
The last step to take is to tell the Pathfinder to send information
to the Mac. You do this in the OUTPUT MENU.
Here's what it should look like. Make sure that the BAUD
RATE on your Pathfinder matches the BAUD RATE of your Serial Keys
software, otherwise the poor things get confused.
Step 5: Using the Pathfinder and the Mac together
Once you have connected the two devices and matched baud rates, you
should be able to send whatever you do on the Pathfinder out to the Mac.
Open up a Word Processor - such as SimpleText or TeachText and start hitting
keys on the PF. You should see things happen in the Word Processor. If
not, check baud rates, connections and the OUTPUT MENU on your Pathfinder.
You can now spend time "fine tuning" your equipment to make
them interact as happily as possible.
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