Changing permissions on serial port

Question

I'm using the Arduino IDE in Ubuntu, and am having issues with the serial port. It has worked in the past, but for reasons that may be unnecesary, I felt the need to change the ownership of some of the files from root ownership to my users ownership.

This made the IDE work correctly, but I lost the ability to use the correct serial port. In the dev folder, the port I need is listed as permission 166. Someone (who is no longer in the area to help me) swapped the permissions to 666, which made it all work gloriously.

However, it reverted back as soon as I restarted my computer, and if I now try to use the command:

sudo chmod 666 ttyACM0

nothing happens. No error messages, but no permission change either.

How can I change it, and how can I get it to change permanently.

I apologize if this question is overly simplistic or unclear, I'm an ubuntu noob, and I wouldn't begrudge feedback!

Answer 1

The issue with the permissions for /dev/ttyACM0 can be permanantly solved by adding yourself to the dialout group. You will have to logout and then log back in before the group change is recognized.

You can do this with useradd -a -G dialout terrik if terrik is your username.

Answer 2

I couldn't get Rinzwind's suggestion to work, because it complained that the user account already exists. Instead, I used this command to add an existing user (terrik) to an existing group (dialout), as described on the Ubuntu Help Wiki.

sudo adduser terrik dialout

Also useful is this command for listing your current groups, although as Rinzwind says, you have to log out and log in before the serial port starts letting you in.

groups terrik