It says that the Linux drivers are coming soon for this. How soon is that? Do you have any in beta that I could use in the interim?
Thank you.
Shawn
I think the USB 16 servo controller is based on the same USB to Serial chip (SL CP2102, can anyone confirm this?) as the Pololu USB to Serial adapter. The real problem is that Silicon Labs, the company that makes the chips and driver-generating software for embedded aplications, has been dragging their feet with the driver support (check out this thread)
You can try downloading iffy Linux drivers from SL here:
http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/USB/en/mcu_vcp.htm
Some flavors of Linux have support for the chip built in (see this thread again), so you might also want to try just plugging it in. I recently had Kubuntu (KDE bundled with Ubuntu, based on Linux kernel 2.6.17-11) recognize a Pololu USB to Serial adapter without drivers. It was a pleasant surprise.
Now, for the obvious question: What are you planning on doing with 16 servos?
Good luck!
-Adam
The chip used in the Pololu USB products is supported in recent versions of the linux kernel, and support continues to improve. We recommend compiling the latest kernel from the 2.6 series. At the moment, you will need to edit the source code to add the Pololu vendor/product IDs to the file
drivers/usb/serial/cp2101.c
Adding the entry
{ USB_DEVICE(0x10c4, 0x803b) },
to the list “id_table” defined in that file should be sufficient. After you are successfully running this kernel, plug in your pololu product and a device file
/dev/tts/USB0
or
/dev/ttyUSB0
should be automatically created.
- Candice
I’ve had good luck running the examples in Ubuntu (Feisty). This pretty much worked out of the box for me following the example given in the comments above. (/dev/ttyUSB0, etc.)
I used Python with pySerial to get started quickly and have had good luck with it. I posted some sample code in another article.
Regards,
-Jim