FTDI USB device not removed after unplugging

Solution 1:

I've found the Apple FTDI driver behaves more predictably than the one from FTDI.

Use kextstat | grep FTDI to see which driver you have. On my MBP I had com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver (2.3) ... which exhibited the (unwanted) behavior described by the OP.

I removed that driver with sudo kextunload -b com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver.

Next time the FTDI dongle was installed, the apple FTDI driver was loaded automatically. kextstat|grep FTDI reports com.apple.driver.AppleUSBFTDI (5.0.0) ... Now I can remove and replace the dongle and it continues to be recognized by the Arduino IDE.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

I cannot guarantee that this will work, but I finally had some success today with an extremely similar problem with another USB device using an FTDI chip:

This may only work for El Capitan, as it has its own built in driver. All I had to do was uninstall the FTDI-provided driver, reboot, and simply let the built in driver work on its own, and the ports now stay available!

It may also help to apply the latest OS X 10.11.5 update.

PLEASE NOTE: I have read elsewhere in my searches that if this doesn't work, then instead you may have to do the reverse, and uninstall the built in driver, possibly on each reboot, to ensure it doesn't conflict with the FTDI-provided driver.

If you can narrow down the solution to your exact situation, please post a better answer here to replace mine.

Solution 3:

There's a conflict between the native Apple driver and the one you installed from FTDI. You have to disable either one of them.

For e.g. Sparkfun wrote a how-to on that.