CH340 CH341 serial adapters on macOS 10.12 Sierra

After installing your new, shiny, macOS update you might have found out like me that plugging in any device that relies on a CH340/CH340G/CH341 device (like the ESP8266 based Wemos D1 Mini) immediately throws a kernel panic. Not ideal…

So far, I did not find a solution to making it work, but read below for the solution to avoid getting kernel panics.
I will update this post once I have a working solution.

What you need to do is to remve the problematic kext/driver that is throwing the kernel panic. This kext should be mentioned in the log you can find in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports with a .panic extension.

In my case it was: last loaded kext at 6898626041: wch.usb.usb

You will then need to find where this kext is, in my case is was under /System/Library/Extensions with the name usb.kext. Your names and locations might differ unfortunately.
I was able to confirm it was indeed the driver by doing a cat usb.kext/Contents/Info.plist|grep wch.usb.usb and seeing if it returns anything.
I then removed this and can plug a Wemos D1 Mini without my computer panicking on me.

Using the adapter

As mentioned here, the previously working signed driver does the same thing, so I have no free solution yet to using these serial adapters on macOS Sierra. I will update this post when I i find a solution.

Thanks to our old pal Björn (original drivers post on his blog) and to @sebastianAPW that told me about it, we now have a free, working solution for CH340, CH341 on macOS 10.12 Sierra

Winchiphead signed drivers for CH340-CH341, OS X 10.9 to macOS 10.12

Pay for drivers

One of my readers (thanks Lee) let me know that he tested a paid for driver that worked for him. I have not tested it, as it will remove any motivation of finding a free solution 😛

He said:

I thought you may like to know that https://www.mac-usb-serial.com/ (costs €7.90) seems to work if you unpack the installation packages and manually kextload the driver 🙂

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- September 21, 2016