How to get port to USB FTDI (FT230X Basic UART)

RouterOS General
1

I have a RB951G-2HnD running ROS 6.22 and want to connect to a serial driver chip via router’s USB port to control external device for embedded+remote application via a terminal session.

I can always see the device in “/system resource usb print” below the entry for the router’s usb node.

Most of the time there is nothing listed in “/port print”, for a while though there was what appeared to be the FTDI chip listed but always with inactive status. I could never get active status for that port so I could set rates etc. I don’t know how I got the (disfunctional) port to appear (possibly influenced by playing mentioned below) and after accidentally disabling it in the web interface, now consistently there is nothing listed in “/port print” even though FTDI device is always recognized.

Nothing else about the router seems amiss, looking at logs, etc.

I have toyed with “/system routerboard usb power-reset duration=…” and see the chip disappear and reappear with an incremented unit number.

Additionally I have toyed with “/system routerboard usb usb-mode=force-host”, reboots, shutdown+reconnects. I even reset configuration and started over in hopes I could get the port (however disfunctional) to reappear.

This FTDI chip works transparently (at least) on a 3.16.6 kernel Linux system I have nearby. I don’t have an easy choice to use a different chip unfortunately (embedded in the device I am trying to control).

Any hint as to what is wrong, and a solution?

2

please make sure you use the latest RouterOS and RouterBoard firmware.

3

Through all the above adventures listed above involved routeros v6.22 and firmware v3.19 which is claimed by the router to be the latest, and it looks in the case of v6.22 to be fairly recent. So what else can I do to fix this?

So the USB vendor and product IDs for the FTDI device are 0403:6015. Perhaps is a match to these IDs missing from the equivalent to Linux’s modules.alias in routeros (maps to ftdi_sio module/driver in my Linux)? If so, is there somehow I can add this association?

Turns out my spurious serial port appearance was a red herring: was actually the result of insertion of a connexant usb winmodem (controllerless) in desperation. The serial port stayed (but inactive) when I removed the modem and left me hopeful but confused when I later inserted the FTDI device of interest. So that mystery is solved, but the need to have a serial port with the FTDI device inserted remains.