Flashrom is a utility for reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash ROM chips. It supports a wide range of DIP32 (Dual In-line Package, 32 pins), PLCC32 (Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier, 32 pins ), DIP8 (Dual In-line Package, 8 pins ), SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32-40 (Thin Small-Outline Package, 32 and 40 pins) chips, which use various protocols such as LPC, FWH (Firmware Hub), parallel flash, or SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface). It is run from user space but flashing requires superuser privileges. It supports various mainboards, over 150 flash chip families, 75 chipsets, cross-flashing and hot-flashing. It can also be used to read the current existing BIOS/firmware from a flash chip. For more informations click here. Note: an incorrect use of this software may damage your hardware!

A small program to talk to FTDI chips from Intra2net2; ftdi_eeprom and libFTDI. ftdi_eeprom is a tool for creating, uploading, and erasing the configuration EEPROM for a FT232BM/FT245BM FTDI chip. The EEPROM content is generated using a flexible configuration file. libFTDI is a library to talk to FTDI chips (e.g. FT232BM/245BM, FT2232C/D and FT232/245R) using libusb, including the popular bitbang mode. This library is linked with your program in userspace, no kernel driver required. For more information click here. Note; linux kernel 2.4.20 and greater has VCP drivers for FTDI's FT8U232AM, FT8U245AM and FT8U100AX devices built-in to the OS kernel so no downloads are necessary (for more information about this driver click here). A complete list of the product FTDI is here. There are, also, official drivers released from FTDI for GNU/linux; they are Virtual Com Port (VCP) drivers that cause the USB device to appear as an additional COM port available to the PC and D2XX drivers that allow direct access to the USB device.

gds2000tools is a collection of command line tools for using the GW Instek GDS-2000 series of oscilloscopes. Some models supported;

Should also work (not tested) with the GDS-8x0, GDS-1000, Voltcraft-plus DSO-4000 and DSO-8000 series. The heart is a set of bash shell functions effectively turning a bash shell into a shell for communicating with the oscilloscope and for scripting measurements tasks. The tools are:

• gdsh: a set of bash shell functions to create a shell for sending and receiving data to/from the oscilloscope;
• gds-read-bin: a filter for reading binary waveform data and binary screen snapshot data from the oscilloscope and convert the data to ASCII; gdsh uses this filter.

More than 150 oscilloscope commands are modeled as bash functions. On top of these, additional functions are provided for common high-level tasks like obtaining waveform data as images. To download it click here.

Gpib-utils is a set of command line utilities for configuring and taking data from various instruments; gpib-utils supports save/restore configuration, print screen, and light automated test on a variety of electronic test instruments and it uses linux-gpib software to communicate with instruments using a GPIB USB or PCI adapter. Gpib-utils natively supports LAN-connected instruments using VXI 11 protocol to communicate with instruments via Ethernet, including GPIB instruments connected via a VXI-11 gateway. Supported instruments are;

For more information about gpib-utils, click here.