1-Wire on Mac OS X and Universal Binaries
Posted by Scott Hughes Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:51:00 GMT
Since posting my OneWireViewer App+Source for Mac OS X last August, I still see fairly regular downloads of it in my stats. I also still see lots of hits from google searches for “1-wire” and “mac osx”. I thought I’d let any interested parties know that we are gearing up to release our 1-Wire Public Domain Kit (C code) very soon (likely this month). I put in some effort for this release to create a specific Serial (DS9097U) and USB (DS2490/DS9490) build for Mac OS X. The release will include full source and a build file, as well as pre-built Universal Binaries of all of the example apps. Those without much programming knowledge looking to integrate 1-Wire into bigger systems should appreciate that.
Learning how to build the Universal Binaries was a bit of a chore, but once you get the hang of it it’s fairly simple. The biggest complication was building a Universal Binary for libUSB and since I wanted my libUSB-dependent app to be Universal, I had to jump through hoops to get it to work. I was able to get 0.1.12 to build an Intel library just fine on my Intel Mac (though <= 0.1.11 didn’t work for me, so mind your sources). I couldn’t get it to build the Universal binary due to it’s use of ‘ar’ and ‘ranlib’ (which, according to this tech note from Apple does bad things to Universals). I’m not a configure or makefile whiz and I got a little stumped on the parts of the makefile where gcc was being used to generate new makefiles dynamically (wasn’t aware of this feature before). Apparently when using -MT (to generate new makefile rules) you can’t pass multiple architectures along with your compile command (i.e. “-arch i386 -arch ppc”). I ended up doing things the hard way and just compiling the PPC binary on a PPC mac, and then merging the two with lipo (i.e. “lipo -create -output uni.lib ppc.lib intel.lib”). After all that, I discovered a nice pkg installer for a Universal libUSB that someone else was nice enough to pre-build and distribute for us. I recommend this installer for the easiest path to a Universal binary of libUSB.
My next task is to recompile my Java-to-libUSB-to-1-Wire solution (for OneWireViewer and the rest of the examples in the 1-Wire API for Java) as a Universal Binary. I also need to put a little effort into making it work with libUSB on Linux, so I can update the “live” WebStart version of OneWireViewer with virtually out-of-the-box support for every platofrm. The 1-Wire API for Java was scheduled for release this quarter (ending in 2 weeks), so I hope to have all this done in time to ship out the door with the release.
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