How to bind USB device under a static name?

As suggested, you can add some udev rules. I edited the /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules to contain:

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001", SYMLINK+="my_uart"

You can check for the variables of your device by running

udevadm info -a -p  $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/ttyUSB0)

There is a more in depth guide you can read on http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

The rule syntax above may work on some distributions, but did not work on mine (Raspbian). Since I never found a single document that explains all the ins and outs, I wrote my own, to be found here. This is what it boils down to.
1. find out what's on ttyUSB:

dmesg | grep ttyUSB  

2. list all attributes of the device:

udevadm info --name=/dev/ttyUSBx --attribute-walk

(with your device number(s) instead of x, of course). Pick out a unique identifier set, eg idVendor + idProduct. You may also need SerialNumber if you have more than one device with the same idVendor and idProduct. SerialNumbers ought to be unique for each device.
3. Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/99-usb-serial.rules with something like this line in it:

SUBSYSTEM=="tty", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1234", ATTRS{idProduct}=="5678", SYMLINK+="your_device_name" 

(assuming you don't need a serial number there, and of course with the numbers for idVendor and idProduct that you found in step 2.
4. Load the new rule:

sudo udevadm trigger

5. Verify what happened:

ls -l /dev/your_device_name  

will show what ttyUSB number the symlink went to. If it's /dev/ttyUSB1, then verify who owns that and to which group it belongs:

ls -l /dev/ttyUSB1   

Then just for the fun of it:

udevadm test -a -p  $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/your_device_name)

The multiple-identical-USB-device problem

I have a Rasperry Pi with four cameras. I take pix with fswebcam which identifies the cameras as /dev/video0 .. video3. Sometimes the camera is video0, vide02, video4 and video6 but we can forget about that for now.

I need a persistent ID to identify a camera number so that, e.g. video0 is always the same camera because I caption the pictures. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen reliably - on boot, the cameras get enumerated as video0..video3 but not always the same way.

The cameras all have the same ID and serial number.

The solution to this problem involves udev rules, but there's a lot of fishhooks there as well.

If you issue the command

udevadm info –attribute-walk –path=/dev/video0

you get a screed of output but the salient bits are

KERNEL=”video0”, SUBSYSTEM=”video4linux” and KERNELS=”1:1.2.4:1.0”.

The KERNELS bit is a USB hub port. With four cameras there are four of these - they do not change on reboot , but the video{x} associated with a port may change.

So we need a udev rule to tie a video number to a USB hub port - something like:

KERNEL==”video0”,SUBSYSTEM=”video4linux”,KERNELS==”1:1.2.4:1.0”,SYMLINK+=”camera0” 

Looks simple – access the camera with

fswebcam –d  $realpath /dev/camera0

Except it doesn’t work – if you put this in a udev rule and the system has allocated video0 (on boot) to a different port, the udev rule is ignored. The symlink to /dev/camera0 basically says no such device. Square one.

What we want is to bind a symlink to a USB hub address, not a video{x} number. It took a Python program.

First step was to run

fswebcam –d /dev/video${x}  tst.jpg

for x between 1 and 8. The existence of tst.jpg after each call identifies whether there is a camera on this video number. From this make a list of active video numbers. My experience has been that it is either 0,1,2,3 or 0,2,4,6 for cameras I have used.

Others may of course build this list using a different process.

Then for each video number in the list run

udevadm info –attribute-walk –path=/dev/videox > dd

and extract the KERNELS= line from dd. From this process you end up with a list of the USB port addresses for the cameras. Sort this list so that at the next step, you always process it in the same order. Call this the "address list".

Run the udevadm … > dd thing again and make a list that looks like

KERNEL==”video0”, SUBSYSTEM=”video4linux”,KERNELS==”1:1.2.4:1.0 ”,SYMLINK+=”camerax”. Call this the “video list”.

Now step through the address list - for each entry find the corresponding entry from the video list. Create a new list that looks like a collection of lines like

KERNEL==”video0”, SUBSYSTEM=”video4linux”,KERNELS==”1:1.2.4:1.0 ”,SYMLINK+=”camera2”

The x (symlink number) is replaced by the sequence number in the address list.

Now you have a udev rule that works. A symlink that is tied to a USB hub address no matter what video number is allocated to that port at boot.

Write the final list into a file /etc/udev/rules.d/cam.rules. Run udevadm trigger to activate it and the job is done. /dev/camera2 will be the same camera (USB port) regardless of its video number.