How to get OS X 10.9 Mavericks and Arduino IDE to play nicely with each other

Apple tried to be smart with OS X Mavericks, developing their own FTDI drivers. Just too bad they don’t seem to work.

I have been getting nothing but “avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding” errors when trying to upload sketches to various Arduino compatible boards.
In the end, the only thing that worked was programming the boards using a dedicated programmer (in my case an USBasp).

Some digging around forums and Apple’s support site, the following steps has solved the issue on all the OS X machines where I have tried it. In short, you need to replace Apple’s drivers with the ones from FTDI.

1. Open a terminal
2. cd /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns
3. sudo mv AppleUSBFTDI.kext AppleUSBFTDI.disabled
4. sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
5. Restart computer
6. Install FTDI’s virtual COM port drivers from http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm. In version 2.2.18 this package contains two executable files, I have had success with the one named FTDIUSBSerialDriver_10_4_10_5_10_6_10_7
7. Restart again (might not be needed, good practise though after installing drivers)

Voila – The Arduino IDE can now upload sketches to all boards I have tried, both with the old/legacy bootloader and Optiboot.