Update Oct 11th 2012

It may not be necessary to add a new udev rule to access a CurrentCost (or program a Nanode). Instead it may just be necessary to add yourself to the dialout group. Haven’t tested this on a new installation yet.

udev manages the /dev/ filesystem on a modern Linux machine. When you first connect a Current Cost USB cable to a Linux machine, you may find that the relevant /dev/ttyUSB[0-9] file has not got the correct permissions to allow you to access it as a normal user.

These are the steps that allowed me to connect my Current Cost to my Ubuntu Server 12.04 machine:

  1. I added my username, jack group with the command sudo usermod -a -G fuse jack (append) is ESSENTIAL! If you forget the -a then your username will only be in the fuse group. If you accidentally forget the -a then boot into Ubuntu recovery mode, then run a disk check (to mount the filesystem as read/write), then drop into root command line mode, then issue the comman usermod -a -G sudo username as per the instructions here and then you can add yourself to the default groups listed here.)
  2. Log out and log back in again for the group changes to take effect (it isn’t sufficient to close the terminal and open it again).

  3. I created a new file /etc/udev/rules.d/current-cost.rules. This file contains the following text:

    SUBSYSTEM!="usb_device", ACTION!="add", GOTO="currentcost_rules_end"
 
# Current Cost (the following rule should be all on one line)
ATTRS{idVendor}=="067b", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2303", MODE="660", GROUP:="fuse" 
 
LABEL="currentcost_rules_end"
  4. After saving this file, I unplugged all Current Cost EnviR monitors from my machine and plugged them in again. (Note that running sudo service udev restart doesn’t appear to be sufficient or necessary to start using the new udev rules.)
  5. Check that the permissions have been set correctly by running ls -ld /dev/ttyUSB?. The result should be something like this: crw-rw---- 1 root fuse 188, 0 Aug 10 08:43 /dev/ttyUSB0 (the crucial things to check are that group has read and write permissions and that the group is set to fuse rules

Each line is a rule. udev and !=; if those checks all succeed then it evaluates the assignment operators = (the second of which ensures that the value assigned to that key isn’t changed by a subsequent rule). Let’s consider the line which starts ATTRS... (owner and group have read and write permissions) and will set GROUP:="fuse" ensures that the group will not be changed later) for all devices where ATTRS{idVendor}=="067b" and ATTRS{idProduct}=="2303".

How do we which attributes to check for? If we only care about idVendor then plug the device in and run lsusb

jack@lenovo:~/workingcopies/iam_logger$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 5986:0241 Acer, Inc BisonCam, NB Pro
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:0158 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. USB 2.0 multicard reader
Bus 002 Device 026: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2150 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046 Bluetooth Device

The line Bus 002 Device 026: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port is my Current Cost USB cable. If we want finer control then run udevadm info --name=/dev/ttyUSB0 --attribute-walk to see a long list of key, value pairs you could use in your udev rules.

More info: