The ZIO motherboard is accessed through a USB serial interface. The ZIO USB serial driver is available in kernel since version 2.6.34.

Plug the ZIO Motherboard into the USB port. dmesg should report that the device was detected and attached to ttyACMx. This device file name should be used to communicate with the board. The exact device filename can be obtained using dmesg. A sample listing is shown below, where the device file name is indicated as ttyACM0.

$ dmesg | tail
usb 2-1.2: new full-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd
cdc_acm 2-1.2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
cdc_acm 2-1.2:1.0: No union descriptor, testing for castrated device
cdc_acm 2-1.2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
cdc_acm: USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
USB Serial support registered for zio
usbcore: registered new interface driver zio

The device file generally belongs to the dialout group. Users who would like to access the device should be a member of the dialout group. The user xyz can be added to the dialout group using the following command.

# usermod -a -G dialout xyz