Linux – How to communicate with Keithley devices on linux (without NI VISA)

Under Linux, you'd probably use avrdude to program them. It supports most programmers and most AVR chips. The main thing to watch out for, is that I think you need to use avr-objcopy to extract the data from the 'ELF' binary files, you can't program the 'ELF' directly with avrdude.

Random googling for avr-objcopy / avrdude commandlines comes up with this, which looks like it might work:

# create demo.bin from demo.elf
avr-objcopy -j .text -j .data -O binary demo.elf demo.bin

# program demo.bin to the 'flash' memory in an 'atmega128' chip,
# using a 'stk200' programmer connected to the 'lpt1' port on your computer
avrdude -p atmega128 -c stk200 -P lpt1 -U flash:w:demo.bin:r

Check the permissions on the /dev/tty* devices. Linux distributions often require you to be a member of the "dialout" or "plugdev" groups to access serial devices:

[cshucks@desktop ~]$ ls -la /dev/tty[SU]*
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout   4, 64 Jul 19 12:25 /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout   4, 65 Jul 19 12:25 /dev/ttyS1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout   4, 66 Jul 19 12:25 /dev/ttyS2
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout   4, 67 Jul 19 12:25 /dev/ttyS3
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188,  1 Jul 31 14:58 /dev/ttyUSB1
[cshucks@desktop ~]$ groups
cshucks wheel wireshark plugdev vboxusers dialout
[cshucks@desktop ~]$

Otherwise try running strace ismain to see the actual operating system error code returned from the relevant open() or stat() call, this can be illuminating.