Electronic – How to open up serial terminal for the USB device converter (or, how to enable VCP in linux)

cycloneembeddedftdilinuxserial

I am using a new Cyclone V SoC board by Enclustra (Mercury+ SA2) mounted on their PE-1 BaseBoard.

To connect to the board serially on Windows platform, I have to connect the board which is detected as USB Serial Device Converter in the Device Manager. And, next, from the properties, I need to enable VCP. By doing this, now the attached board shows up as a COM port, which enables me to access it using a serial terminal such as putty. This works correctly.

I'm trying to do the same on my Linux system running Ubuntu 16.04. The device is detected as ttyUSB0. I have already tried the screen statement. The moserial GUI. Doesn't Work. How should I proceed from here? Below is a screenshot:
Screenshot of detected FTDI chip
Thanks 🙂

Best Answer

please check the permissions of the /dev node

$ls -la /dev/ttyUSB0

There is a high chance it shall resemble

crw-rw----. 1 root dialout 188, 0 Jul 18 13:27 /dev/ttyUSB0

A character device with RW permissions for ROOT and RW permissions for dialout group.

If this is the case check the group membership of the user attempting to access

$ groups

if the user is not part of the dialout group, add them 

$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $username

The user then needs to logout and log back into reload the group permissions

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