How to set up Arduino Clone on Ubuntu Linux

Back Story

As much as I don’t like giving lots of stories or theories in my technical guides, I think the story behind this one is rather funny and needs to be shared. Pardon me, you don’t need to read it, you can just go to the next section.

I was trying to build a Robot car, to run ROS2, I needed a motor controller and I chose an Arduino Uno SMD clone, I thought it would work straight out of the box but no, I do use platformIO on my machine, I thought the fault was with that, I switched to my Windows computer and I was able to upload a sketch on the Arduino board so the question remains, why isn’t it working on the Linux Machine?

After trying different solutions online, with no result, I keep on getting just /dev/ttyUSB0 as the only USB port available which shouldn’t be. Enough of the story, I was later able to solve it, solution below.

The Solution

BRLTTY is a background process (daemon) that provides access to the Linux/Unix console (when in text mode) for a blind person using a refreshable braille display. It drives the braille display and provides complete screen review functionality. You might not need this and removing it is the solution, just enter the terminal and type in the command:

sudo apt remove -y brltty

Your Ubuntu machine should now be able to see your Arduino Clone, just select the port normally as you would do while using Arduino IDE or PlatformIO and you can upload your code.

You can also type in this command to verify that your device has been listed:

ls /dev/ttyUSB*

This is my screenshot, my device is USB1