Shipmodul Multiplex-2 USB working under Ubuntu 13.10

[mub]

Posting this here because I have the module reliably talking to OpenCPN, however there are many other navigation programs that could use it.
But there seems to be a lot of 'half-information' about getting it to work.

The issue is that since Shipmodul moved to a custom PID for their FTDI interface chips the FTDI driver does not recognise it.

To make this work I added a udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d
I called it 99-usbftdi.rules - the name is not that important, but having a high number makes sure it gets loaded last and so it is not corrupted by other USB stuff.

# For FTDI FT232 & FT245 USB devices with
# Vendor ID = 0x0403, Product ID = 0xfd4a
#
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}==”fd4a”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0403”,RUN+=”/sbin/modprobe -v ftdi-sio product=0xfd4a vendor=0x0403”
#
ACTION=="remove", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}==”fd4a”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0403”,RUN+=”/sbin/modprobe -v -r ftdi_sio usbserial”
#
#end

there are 2 active lines starting with ACTION. Everything else is a comment line.
My shipmodul has a product ID of fd4a. Yours may be different. You can find this by plugging it the device and running 'lsusb | grep Future'
which on my system returns:
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 0403:fd4a Future Technology Devices International, Ltd

Hope this helps some one else.

---

[mub]

APPARENTLY...

No one used the ability to fire command line vid and pid information into modprobe.
So when the change was made to 14.04 this feature got nixed. The new method is below..

The new /etc/udev/rules.d/99-usb-ftdi-shipmodul.rules

# For FTDI FT232 & FT245 USB devices with
# Vendor ID = 0x0403, Product ID = 0xfd4a
#
ATTRS{idProduct}=="fd4a", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", RUN+="/etc/udev/rules.d/shipmodul-usb-sense"
#
#
#end

this calls a script file /etc/udev/rules.d/shipmodul-usb-sense
I also decided to get rid of the unplug of the shipmodul.. because I don't ever unplug it.

The script file..

#! /bin/sh
/sbin/modprobe ftdi_sio
echo 0403 fd4a > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/ftdi_sio/new_id

Remember to make the script file executable

sudo chmod +x /etc/udev/rules.d/shipmodul-usb-sense

then reload the udev database with...

udevadm control --reload

--

Note I chose to put the script file in /etc/udev/rules.d which is not a really nice place for it... but allowed both modified files to exist in the same directory. Which means that I only had to add one directory to the backup system and ease getting the system the system back when hell breaks loose.