I first experienced an issue trying to connect on Ubuntu running on Proxmox (Virtual Environment)... I thought it was a Proxmox issue. I reached out https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/12sedzx/pass_through_usb_device_to_access_in_vm_devtty/ and believe the issue is actually with Ubuntu. I then tried to connect to Ubuntu via VMware and experienced the same issue.
I documented the issue and how to solve it: https://github.com/Wikilicious/pygmc/tree/v0.7.1#known-issues
GQ GMC uses VID (vendor ID) and PID (Device ID) 1A86:7523. The issue with Ubuntu is that it assumes 1A86:7523 is a “Braille” device (for the blind) and, ironically, blindly treats it as such. Specifically, Ubuntu has udev rules that assumes `1A86:7523` is an `Baum [NLS eReader Zoomax (20 cells)]` device.
The fix is to comment out the udev rule that does this. The text file may be in two places.
/usr/lib/udev/85-brltty.rules OR /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/85-brltty.rules
Find and comment out (or delete) the offending line in the files above: ENV{PRODUCT}=="1a86/7523/*", ENV{BRLTTY_BRAILLE_DRIVER}="bm", GOTO="brltty_usb_run"
It seems all GQ GMC devices use 1A86:7523 from this thread: https://www.gqelectronicsllc.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9784
Extra issue:
I'm trying to make a package (https://pypi.org/project/pygmc/) to work with Home-Assistant and their docs prescribes a solution GQElectronics should use... https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/creating_integration_manifest/#usb
quote:
Some VID and PID combinations are used by many unrelated devices. For example VID 10C4 and PID EA60 matches any Silicon Labs CP2102 USB-Serial bridge chip. When matching these type of devices, it is important to match on description or another identifier to avoid an unexpected discovery.
