Mac Drivers and SD Card Issues

Good News: Smoothieboard appears as a USB Mass Storage device on Mac OS X and generally works without additional drivers.

However, there are some common issues that Mac users may encounter.

This page addresses the most common Mac-specific problems and their solutions.

SD Card Slow to Unmount on Mac OS X

This issue is due to Spotlight indexing the card, especially when large STL files are on the card.

The SD card may take a very long time to unmount or eject, which can be frustrating when you need to quickly make changes.

Solutions

There are two solutions to fix this issue:

Solution 1: Disable Spotlight Indexing

Type this Terminal command when the SD card is mounted:

mdutil -i off /Volumes/Smoothie/

This disables Spotlight indexing for the Smoothie SD card volume.

Solution 2: Prevent Indexing with a Marker File

Place an empty file named .metadata_never_index at the volume root.

This can be done very quickly with the following Terminal command:

cd /Volumes/Smoothie/
touch .metadata_never_index

This creates a marker file that tells macOS not to index this volume.

Recommended: Solution 2 (marker file) is preferred as it is persistent and will continue to work even if you reformat the SD card and restore the marker file.

Solution 1 needs to be re-run each time the SD card is mounted on a new Mac.

Serial Communication

For serial communication with Smoothieboard on Mac OS X, no additional drivers are required.

The board will appear as a serial device at /dev/tty.usbmodem* (the exact name may vary).

You can connect using any serial terminal program such as:

  • Screen (built-in): screen /dev/tty.usbmodem* 115200
  • CoolTerm
  • Serial (Mac App Store)
  • Pronterface (for 3D printing)
  • USB - General USB communication documentation
  • SD Card - SD card setup and usage
  • Pronterface - Recommended host software for 3D printing