Easily use AirConsole on MacOSX
I have recently purchased a AirConsole unit from www.get-console.com. The delivery was fast. Unfortunately the setup was not as smooth as I would have thought. I had to contact the support team which helped me to get it working.
With this post I decided to share my experience in setting up the AirConsole and using it on MacOS. I will also share a little application that opens the console terminal automatically.
1 - SETUP THE AIRCONSOLE ON MACOSX
There are two different ways to use the AirConsole on a Mac:
- Use the AirConsoleOSX application to establish the Bluetooth connection to the AirConsole. In order to make it work, I also had to install the AirConsole OSX drivers.
- Use the built-in Bluetooth menu to connect to the AirConsole. For this to work, you will need to have at least OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) and at least the 2.76 firmware on the AirConsole.
I now use option 2 as I feel it is easier to use on a regular basis. So there is not much to do to setup the bluetooth connection:
Open up the Bluetooth Preferences menu (press ⌘-Space and type “Bluetooth” in the search bar):
As you can see some tty has been created. The tty.Airconsole-1 and tty.NullModem-1 has been created by the AirConsoleOSX drivers (which are not used if you use the Mac Built-in Bluetooth feature). The tty created by the Mac Bluetooth feature is : tty.AirConsole-68-raw-serial.
Note that you might get another name for your tty. Make sure you validate what tty has been created on your computer.
2 - CONNECT THE AIRCONSOLE TO YOUR DEVICE
Once the AirConsole is connected to the console port of your device, you can turn it on. You will see a little switch on the side of the AirConsole. Move the switch towards the letter “R”. The AirConsole will take about 20 seconds to boot up and you will be able to discover it via Bluetooth.
3 - USE THE AIRCONSOLE
Press Enter and you will open the console session.
So it does not do anything crazy. It opens up the Terminal application and uses the screen command to open the console session automatically. I also changed the size of the scrollback history buffer of the console session to 9000 lines. It also sets the name of the Terminal window to “AirConsole”.
If you need to change the name of the tty used by the application, here is how to do it:
Altogether, here is how I use the AirConsole now whenever I need it:
Thank you for reading and feel free to download and use the AirConsoleOutput application.
Cheers’
Monterey macos upgrade breaks this. Please find a fix.