Oscar has a great tutorial on this on his blog: http://blog.oscarliang.net/flash-esc-via...flight-fc/

However, I have a Mac and although I followed a tutorial (youtube.com/watch?v=17b1gNLL2uc) that uses wine to run BLHeli, I didn't think it was possible to also use the pass-through feature of CleanFlight to program with BLHeli.  Well, it is!

If you haven't already set up wine to run BLHeli on your Mac, you will need to do that first.  Then briefly, it's as simple as adding a couple of com ports in your wine configuration.

You will need to know the serial ports that CleanFlight uses on your Mac (in my case cu.SLAB_USBtoUART and tty.SLAB_USBtoUART).  Then open terminal and go to dosdevices in your wine folder.  In the screen shot below, you can see that com1 and com2 are already linked to my USB esc programmer devices, so I just added com3 and com4 as shown.

EDIT: I've boxed the necessary commands in Terminal:  the "cd" command puts you in the correct subdirectory.  the "ln -s" commands create the actual com3 and com4 links to the appropriate serial devices.  Then in BLHeli, you will choose COM3 from the dropdown.  [The other commands (ls -l) just show a list of the current devices in that subdirectory.]



Now, with your FC plugged into the cable you use for CleanFlight, start BLHeli and select the proper interface type and com port (COM 3 in my case).

  

Next, click Connect and you should see that four ESCs are detected - the little white boxes at the bottom. (Four for me anyway.)



Then - VERY IMPORTANT: Plug in your flight battery (you will remove the propellers!).  [I really scratched my head before I realized I needed to power the ESCs.] Now, you are ready to click Read Setup.  You should be rewarded with the beautiful screen shot below.



Click OK and program away!  Good luck!
Scotty

Nice tutorial Scotty, Thanks for sharing. I am sure this will come in handy for us Mac users, :-)

I should mention that if you are using OS X El Capitan, and gave up on BLHeli because you couldn't get your little USB programmer to work (there is a way around that), that this method should work if you've got CleanFlight working on your Mac. At the point in the BLHeli wine setup where you create the links for the serial com ports, just use your CleanFlight ports and forget your little programmer. You don't really need to program the ESCs before you solder them in do you?

No more borrowing your buddy's PC to program with BLHeli.... Use your Mac!