Firmware update on Arduino UNO

So the story is that I had this Arduino UNO with me which I was unable to use.

I think that it’s owner did not really use it for anything serious or used it with Windows. After a bit of googling around I found out that rev1 Uno’s are shipped with a firmware that’s not working with Linux (and requires special drivers on Windows).

The problem is with the guy marked red on the image, namely the Atmega 8u2 which is the replacement for the FTDI chip that can be found on other boards. The trick with this chip is that one can define the most important parts of USB communication: the USB id fields. Other boards using the FTDI chip carry the vendor and product id of FTDI for USB communication therefore the drivers associated to it will be the standard USB-RS232 converter driver. With the use of the Atmega 8u2 we have the freedom to tell the system which driver to attach to the device. So still the problem is that these USB communication id fields are not fit to be used with Linux so a firmware update was released.

There are several tutorials out there addressing this problem and I’m going to introduce the one found on the Arduino website (references below).

Building a Rover project day 5 – info about your wifi hardware

This short article is describing how to set up a new wifi stick for the BeagleBone running the Angström linux distribution.

Plug your BeagleBone, connect to it and also plug the wifi stick.

Let’s see what do you have:

root@beaglebone:~# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0ace:1211 ZyDAS 802.11bg
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Those 2 hexa numbers are already enough information to determine which driver to use with the stick.

They are called vendor and product id.