It is impossible to separate the rise of the Maker Movement and Arduino from the FT232R driver. Before USB-C and built-in USB controllers on microcontrollers became cheap, the only way to program a custom board was via an FT232R breakout board.

The kernel includes the ftdi_sio driver (part of the USB serial subsystem) since kernel 2.6. When an FT232R is plugged in, it loads automatically, creating /dev/ttyUSB0 . Users can configure parameters via stty or termios. For D2XX access, FTDI provides a closed-source library, but many open-source alternatives (e.g., libftdi ) exist.

Installation is generally straightforward:

From the perspective of a developer, the driver abstracts all low-level USB complexity, allowing the use of standard OS serial APIs (e.g., CreateFile on Windows, open() on POSIX systems).