Anatiferous blog | Move every zig.

Howdy! This is my (William Reading's) webpage. At the moment, I only have this blog script and my gallery up, but I hope to get more stuff on this page at some point, or so I thought when I created this site years ago. Updates and shiny new copy to eventually go here. If you'd like to contact me to point out that I've done something to break XHTML/CSS standards or heaven forbid--look at my Vita--drop me a line at my e-mail address bill +spam @ [ELEPHANT] aggienerds.org. Simply remove "+spam", the spaces and the pachyderm along with its brackets and that address will reach me. I'm also available on Jabber/GChat/AIM/MSN with the same address above.

As some of you already know, I have a first generation MSN Direct watch, the Suunto N3. Unlike some of the newer generation smart watches made, this one requires a driver to charge via USB.

On Windows this wasn’t an issue, since I could just grab the drivers from Suunto’s web site and get it charging. That is, until about a week ago. Some update got installed that caused Windows Vista to blue screen whenever the watch was plugged in. Not wanting to have to carry the charging brick between work and home, I did a little poking around and discovered that the charge cable uses a usbserial chip made by FTDI. By changing the strings in the driver’s .inf file, I was able to get the watch to charge without BSODs, though I had to purge the original driver first.

This got me thinking that I could do the same thing on the Mac. I grabbed the driver here: FTDI Virtual COM Port Drivers, rebooted and was good to go. Apparently FTDI decided to include the correct PID and VID in their Mac driver such that it just works.