# Macintosh/FTDI-Friend/XBee, need assistance on Macintosh side **URL:** \ **Category:** USB and Ethernet drivers\ **Created:** [July 20, 2011, 6:03am UTC](https://forums.digi.com/t/macintosh-ftdi-friend-xbee-need-assistance-on-macintosh-side/3098 "2011-07-20T06:03:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jay\_Reynolds\_Freeman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Jay\_Reynolds\_Freeman](https://forums.digi.com/u/Jay_Reynolds_Freeman)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2011, 6:03am UTC](https://forums.digi.com/t/macintosh-ftdi-friend-xbee-need-assistance-on-macintosh-side/3098/1 "2011-07-20T06:03:16Z")
I am new to the Digi support forums and am not quite sure where to post. And my system crosses several interfaces, which makes it more confusing. Apologies if I am posting to the wrong forum. I am trying to drive an XBee Series 1 (not the pro) that is mounted on an AdaFruit XBee adapter board, which is in turn connected to a USB port of my Macintosh via an FTDI Friend USB/TTL-232 cable. The good news is that all the hardware and drivers seem to work; I can talk from a serial monitor on the Mac, through to the XBee and thence to a remote XBee system (backed by a Parallax propellor), and receive reply communications back to the serial monitor. The problem is that I don’t want to use a serial monitor on the Mac, I want to be able to talk through the USB port to the XBee from a C++ program, and I do not know how to do that. I am sure it can be done – the serial ports all do it – but I can’t find any open-source code for them. I would say that I am a very experienced C++ coder in general, but haven’t used hardware ports under Unix at all, ever. I am hoping there is some way to open the port MacOS creates for me – something of the form /dev/tty.usbserial-ABCD1234 – and use the likes of fgetc and fputc to do what I want, perhaps using ioctl to configure the port, but I am not sure how to do that and could use pointers to some tutorials or sample code, if it is indeed possible to o it that way, or some other form of guidance if it is not. Thanks much …