Last week, I got a fancy new JTAGICE3 programmer / debugger. I wanted to achieve two things in my Pinoccio work: Faster uploading of programs (Having 256k of flash space is nice, but flashing so much code through a 115200 baud serial connection is slow...) and doing in-circuit debugging (stepping through code and dumping variables should turn out easier than adding serial prints and re-uploading every time).

In any case, the JTAGICE3 device is well-supported by avrdude, the opensource uploader for AVR boards. However, unlike devices like the STK500 development board, the AVR dragon programmer/debugger and the Arduino bootloader, which use an (emulated) serial port to communicate, the JTAGICE3 uses a native USB protocol. The upside is that the data transfer rate is higher, but the downside is that the kernel doesn't know how to talk to the device, so it doesn't expose something like /dev/ttyUSB0 as for the other devices.

avrdude solves this by using libusb, which can talk to USB devices directly, through files in /dev/usb/. However, by default these device files are writable only by root, since the kernel has no idea what kind of devices they are and whom to give permissions.

To solve this, we'll have to configure the udev daemon to create the files in /dev/usb with the right permissions. I created a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-local-jtagice3.rules, containg just this line:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03eb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2110", GROUP="dialout"

This matches the JTAGICE3 specifically using it's USB vidpid (03eb:2110, use lsusb to find the id of a given device) and changes the group for the device file to dialout (which is also used for serial devices on Debian Linux), but you might want to use another group (don't forget to add your own user to that group and log in again, in any case).