Attaching to a Raspberry Pi's Serial Console (UART) for Debugging

jeffgeerling.com

14 points·todsacerdoti··6 comments

Beaglebone was cool in that the default way of using it was to connect by usb to get all of the following: power to the board, network/internet to the board and SSH.

Most likely it has lower power requirements than the Pi. Your PCs USB ports cut off any load that draws more than 500 (USB 2) or 900 mA (USB 3). The Pi Zero which has the lowest power requirements, requires 1.5 A, although I think I have gotten away with 1 amp wall chargers in the past.

Another reason I prefer to use Ubuntu on the RPi for headless deployment, the serial console is enabled by default. The other reasons are ssh being enabled by default and the ability to use cloud-init for initial configuration.

Did you know you can enable ssh by placing a file at a specific place on the SD card?

From the documentation page on remote access

For headless setup, SSH can be enabled by placing a file named ssh, without any extension, onto the boot partition of the SD Card. When the Raspberry Pi boots, it looks for the ssh file. If it is found, SSH is enabled and the file is deleted.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/computers/remote-a...

And if you’re using a 0 or don’t have Ethernet handy, you can also a place a wpa_supplicant.conf file with your WiFi details at the top level of the SD card.

I did know this but I prefer it just working to having to place magic files places.

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