David - Musings of an SRE

Access your Raspberry Pi/UDOO via Serial

Learnt today that it is possible to have a direct output from most minipc boards w/o having to ssh in and dmesg, or hook up another monitor to it, just to find out what’s going on.

This is especially useful if you only have one monitor and don’t want to go through the trouble of switching both your keyboard/mouse combo and the monitor everytime you want to troubleshoot it (without sshing; if the internet connection is what you’re trying to troubleshoot).

On Linux, you’d need to install minicom.

$ sudo apt-get install minicom

# configure the minicom
$ minicom -sw

# Ensure that the Serial Device is set to /dev/ttyUSB0 if you're using a USB
# connection to connect the device to your PC (options A)

# Communications paramaters must be 115200 8N1 (options E)
# Flow control: neither hardware nor software must be checked (options F & G)

# save as dfl and exit

$ sudo minicom -w

# you should now see a bunch of output as you reboot your udoo board with the
USB connected

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