Monitoring USB Port Status on a Mac

[Naby]

I have long had repeated trouble keeping my weather station (a Davis Vantage Pro 2) connected to my computer. I have tried every suggestion that was made to me in the post I made in the "Bugs" forum but I still experience communication issues.

I think the issue has to be the reliability of the USB connection to my computer. My guess is that noise or some other type of interference is causing the connection to drop out.

With that said, is there a way to monitor what is going on with the USB ports on my iMac? Windows provides fairly good information and you can easily see that there is a problem with a com port or that a particular USB device is not connected at all. Is there a way to do this on a Mac?

Thanks,
Chris

[Felix]

I expect USB Prober would do what you want but I think the only way to get it is part of the Developer SDK which requires an Apple Developer account.

Might also look at Wireshark if you have X11 loaded.

First though, I'd try some ferrite clamps on the cables.

[elagache]

Dear Chris and WeatherCat Davis caregivers,

I have long had repeated trouble keeping my weather station (a Davis Vantage Pro 2) connected to my computer. I have tried every suggestion that was made to me in the post I made in the "Bugs" forum but I still experience communication issues.

I second the suggestion of the ferrite clamps if you haven't already added that.  Also, if you haven't contacted Davis technical support, you might want to do that.  It could be a defective data logger or even just a bad cable from Davis.

It is no cure, but there is a way to get some sort of alert when you lose communication with your weather station.  There is an AppleScript called WC Status Growler.  It is part of the WeatherCat Scripts collection I wrote:

http://athena.trixology.com/index.php?topic=1039.0

I started writing these scripts because I had a similar problem to yours and WC Status Growler has special features to get your attention.  You can use Growl to produce a spoken warning that the communications has failed.  Since my computer also services as the jukebox for the whole house, no matter where I was in the house, I would find out that the station communications had failed.  Now that there also exists the iOS utility Prowl, you could even get a notification on your iPhone.

It is a bit of a chore to set up these AppleScripts, but if you want to avoid protracted outages at least you can be alerted to when communications has failed.

Cheers, Edouard 

[Blicj11]

I know this is late to post to this thread, but here is an Apple Support document that addresses how to monitor USB port speed and to see what is currently connected to them:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202875

It's not much information, but it's free.

[elagache]

Dear Blick and WeatherCat Mac caregivers,

I know this is late to post to this thread, but here is an Apple Support document that addresses how to monitor USB port speed and to see what is currently connected to them:

It doesn't provide a ton of information, but it is better than nothing.  So this is a useful thing to add to our Mac maintenance toolbox.  Thanks for posting it! 

Cheers, Edouard