Writing a Bus Pirate udev rule

It only took a couple of instances where the Bus Pirate wasn’t linked to /dev/ttyUSB0 before I got sick of that game and wrote a udev rule to create a symlink. Now, every time I plug it in it is available at /dev/buspirate. This simple bit of code creates the rule:

sudo echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0403", ATTR{idProduct}=="6001", MODE="0660", SYMLINK+="buspirate"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/47-BusPirate.rules
sudo restart udev

Note: The restart udev command is for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Older version should run “sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart” instead.

That should do it.  You can now point your serial terminal program to ‘/dev/buspirate’. This doesn’t differentiate between different devices using the same FTDI chip but I don’t have any others so this isn’t a problem. If you need to specifically pinpoint this Bus Pirate as a unique device, add a compare key that looks at the serial number (ATTRS{serial}==”YourSerialNumberHere”).

Using the Bus Pirate with Ubuntu

Ian Lesnet sent me a Bus Pirate to play with, thank you! I’m excited to dig in but first thing’s first, I’ve got to get it running with Ubuntu.  It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what I was doing so I thought I’d post a quick-start guide for Ubuntu users.