upowerd still hogs fdti RS232 to USB chips

[Brendan Peterffy]

Binary package hint: upower

A faulty udev rule causes ANY devices that use the popular FDTI RS232 to USB chips to be falsely identified as a device produced by "Watts Up? inc.".
If the company was too lazy to register a vendor ID then they shouldn't have their devices be considered unique as this breaks compatibility the generic USB to Serial IC.
Lord knows what would happen if upowerd tried to probe something like an AVR programmer while it was writing to a chip!
This rule should be removed, since I've never even heard of the "Watts Up pro", but everything from arduino boards to simple USB serial dongles use this chip!

This problem has been around since at least mid june, judging by some debian bug reports on the same issue.

[Brendan Peterffy (s33plusplus)]

I've just looked through the datasheet for the FTDI chip in question.
The Vendor ID and Device ID can be reprogrammed with little effort, so it looks like "Watts Up? inc." shouldn't be getting the default default IDs associated with them.
The datasheet can be found here for those who are interested: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/ICs/DS_FT232R.pdf

[Matthieu Herrb (matthieu-herrb)]

I'm also facing this problem. It's fixed upstreams an in Debian:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=586751