virtualbox.org

Hello,

I am running Windows 7 from a Mac OS Maverick host (note that I also tried with Yosemite with the same issue).
From the guest OS, I want to be able to use an Arduino micro, connected to the computer's USB bus. The USB is correctly captured by Virtual box, and the devices shows under Windows. However, when I try to install the drivers for the device, it fails.

I took me a while to understand what the problem is, but looking at the driver, it is looking for the following hardware information:
USB\VID_23411&PID_8037&REV_0100&MI_00
USB\VID_2341&PID_8037&MI_00

When I connect the device to a computer running windows natively, and I check the hardware information of the arduino, I indeed see what the driver is expecting (and therefore, no problem, the device is working properly). But when I look a the same information when I connect the Arduino through VirtualBox, here is what I see:
USB\VID_23411&PID_8037&REV_0100
USB\VID_2341&PID_8037

The &MI_00 part is missing, and it therefore doesn't match what the driver is expecting.

Does anyone know what is happening?

Thanks in advance,

Samuel

Have you checked to see if the device is working natively on OSX? It's supposed to with its OSX software.

Yes the device works fine on OSX. It is a serial port, and doesn't require any driver to work with OSX.

I guess that makes me wonder why you are trying to get it to work in a guest.

Yes, that's a good question.

The reason is that I'm developing a platform independent GUI to communicate with the device. I want to test that everything is working correctly on both OSX and Windows. Now each time I want to do test under windows, I need to reboot and use Bootcamp W7. It would be much more convenient to just use virtualbox...

I see. My feeling is, running Windows in Bootcamp is no different than running Windows on a Windows PC. That is not the case when running Windows in a virtual machine. There may be hardware needs for certain USB devices that aren't addressed in VirtualBox or perhaps any hypervisor that is available for OSX. One thing you could try is one of the commercial hypervisors for OSX and see if they work any better for you. The two main commercial programs have free trials so if they don't work you aren't out anything.