Arduino works on dev machine but not robot

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Troubleshooting
1

I just got a new arduino diecimila and the experience has been mostly painless. I was able to plug it into my desktop, write some software to read the analog ports and upload it to the board without too much difficulty. On my desktop, the software seems to work correctly, for example, if I:

# tail -f /dev/ttyUSB0

and then

# echo "A0" > /dev/ttyUSB0

the board will output the value of analog channel 0. However, when I plug the board into a different computer (a laptop onboard a robot) I can perform the exact same procedure and get no output from the port whatsoever. The desktop is running Kubuntu with a 2.6.24-19 kernel, the laptop is running Debian Etch with a 2.6.18-4 kernel. The only difference I can see if that the driver on the laptop seems to detect the chip differently than the driver on the desktop. The laptop reports:

drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232BM
usb 1-1.2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

while the desktop reports

[ 4367.443030] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232RL
[ 4367.443121] usb 3-3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

is the ft232bm vs. ft232rl difference the source of my issue? are there known issues with earlier versions of the ftdi_sio driver? it is a huge pain to update the kernel on the laptop -- long story -- if i do need to update the driver is there a way to replace the existing module in my current kernel?

2

Maybe try using screen (so you can explicitly specify the baud rate) or a python or other program that's using a serial library. Sometimes tail and echo work, sometimes they don't, and I'm not sure why. Anyone know any more?