I purchased a Sainsmart 4 channel USB relay board which seems to be based on a FTDI FT245RL chip. I should be easy enough to use. when you plug it in it appears as a serial port (VCP). You send it three bytes which tell it what to turn on and off. E.g. \xFF\x00\x01 turns on just relay 1 and \xff\x00\x03 turns on relay 1 and 2.I wrote a very simple python program to test this on a Debian squeeze machine:import serialser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0') # Defaults to 9600 8N1ser.open()ser.write(chr(255) + chr(0) + chr(3))ser.close...and nothing happened. Sometimes I get nothing, and sometimes it blocks. I installed the drivers on a win7x64 machine, and changed one line to point to COM3, it works great. I then tried it on a CentOS 5 machine and it doesn't work here either. I don't think it is permissions, I've added the users to the dialout and uucp groups respectively. I've also tried it as root. I was able to set up a udev rule on Debian which seems to work. If I do lsusb, this is the relevant result:Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) ICIf I do stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 -a  I getspeed 9600 baud; rows 0; columns 0; line = 0;intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^A; eol = <undef>; eol2 = <undef>; swtch = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z;rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 0; time = 0;-parenb -parodd cs8 hupcl -cstopb cread clocal -crtscts-ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr -icrnl -ixon -ixoff -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -iutf8-opost -olcuc -ocrnl -onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0-isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt -echoctl -echoke
Trouble communicating with FTDI FT245RL on ttyUSB0. works fine on Win7x64
debian;centos;usb;serial port