Remote uplodad and debug

Maybe you have similar setup at home as me. That is you have your OHS gateway close in some storage room along with your home server. I have it, my network panel, my small backup/sharing server (running excellent Open Media Vault), and my OHS gateway sit close to each other. And my desk computer is down one floor. It is rather inconvenient to push upgrades to gateway, one would have to put the code into laptop, go upstairs, take a chair and plug the FTDI programmer in. Each time you make some changes in code. So I have searched and found rather nice solution to this.

I use remote serial over TCP network. My server runs basically a Debian fork and after small search and couple of tries I found a program called socat. Socat can take physical /dev/tty* device and stream it over TCP. My example:

socat tcp-l:1234,reuseaddr,fork file:/dev/ttyUSB0,nonblock,raw,echo=0,waitlock=/var/run/tty,b115200

This above creates a stream of /dev/ttyUSB0 to TCP port 1234.

On the other side there is not much to install or setup, just use avrdude command line. Only thing you need to do in Arduino IDE is to select Sketch->Export compiled binary, this will place two hex files in you sketch folder. Then using avrdude command push the hex to created network serial port like this:

avrdude -p m1284p -c arduino -P net:10.10.10.127:1234 -Uflash:w:main_board.ino.with_bootloader.standard.hex 

Where net:10.10.10.127:1234 is target machine virtual network serial port, and other parameters represents Atmega1284p configuration with Arduino bootloader. Only one warning is issued by avrdue:

ioctl("TIOCMGET"): Inappropriate ioctl for device 

But it can be safely ignored. And this is it. Happy programming!