While screen is an excellent tool, I’d highly recommend checking out tio, which is a serial terminal emulator specifically designed for hardware hacking/development:
It has a lot of nice features, such as defaulting to 115200 8n1 and gracefully reconnecting when a serial device goes down and comes back up (like when updating the firmware on the BP5). It also offers a remapping function which can fix some of the unusual behaviors the BP exhibits under different platforms (such as backspace not working).
In the config file, you can even setup profiles for different devices. Mine looks like this:
# Config file for tio serial terminal emulator
[bp5]
device = /dev/ttyACM0
map = INLCRNL,ODELBS
[bp3]
device = /dev/ttyUSB0
map = INLCRNL,ODELBS
This lets me connect to either the v5 or v3 Bus Pirate by simply running:
tio bp5
or
tio bp3