Wild Thumper Dagu Controller not recognized on Ubuntu raring

Robotics and electronics discussion Miscellaneous
1

My Dagu controller https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/11057 sits inside a 6 Wheeled Wild Thumper and is powered by Ni Mh batteries. It’s connected to a laptop running Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring), where it’s not getting recognized as a device by neither the OS nor by the Arduino IDE.

This is what I did on my laptop: I installed the 1.0.3 Arduino that comes from apt-get, and found that arduino de-highlights the Serial port option. When I upload any script whatsoever, it complains that the port COM1 isn’t found, and asks me to set the Serial Port in the IDE. Of course, since this option isn’t highlighted I can’t do this. The output from lsusb and dmesg|tail are shown at http://pastebin.com/xzxHpqcr; they indicate that Linux itself is unable to find the device. I suspect it’s some issue with installing the ftdi drivers?

Here are my debugging steps:

  1. I’ve checked that the controller is powered on , as its LED glows.
  2. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ftdi-drivers/all This page tells me that the FTDI drivers come by default with arduino on ubuntu. But since this didn’t work, I tried installing them manually from here http://www.ftdichip.com/FTDrivers.htm. No luck.
  3. I disconnected the Wild Thumper and put an Arduino Mega in its place at the same usb port. This works beautifully without problems.

What am I missing here ?

2

Hello.

We do not manufacture or sell that controller, so we are not very familiar with using it. However, someone else on our forum might know more about it.

-Jon

3

Having the exact same problem.
@draco, did you find a solution?

4

What does “lsusb” say?
What does “tail /var/log/messages” say when you hook it up?
Or, if you’re using systemd, what does “journalctl -b” say at the end after you’ve hooked it up?
Or you can use udevadm to monitor the udev when plugging it in, to see if there’s a permission problem. If so, you need to add a udev rule to set the mode of the device to 0666, or add your user or group to the device.