Tinygo flash errors

Flashing to a port may be a source of pain with a unconfigured computer. Here are some common problems when trying to get your first program on a device.

• Serial port permission problems (Linux)

Permission Denied (Linux)

This error is usually encountered when flashing your first program, here’s a typical error:

avrdude: ser_open(): can't open device "/dev/ttyACM0": Permission denied

The above error may be followed by ioctl errors too.

To fix this we must make sure our user is included in the group with access to serial ports. On ubuntu and Debian this is the dialout group. The equivalent group on Arch Linux based distributions is uucp.

First we can check if we are not already part of the dialout group:

groups

The output should look something like youruser adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin lxd sambashare. If dialout is not present in the groups we can add ourselves to it with the following command:

sudo usermod -aG dialout $(whoami)

This will add our current user to dialout group. Log out and log in again to complete the procedure. You should now be able to flash to your device.

As a last resort if this does not work you can try to modify the permissions with chmod. For the error above we may try sudo chmod a+rw /dev/ttyACM0 where /dev/ttyACM0 is the serial port we are trying to flash to.