f-log

I have been looking for a way to use my Raspberry Pi A as it is has no ethernet port. Most of my Pi work is done through ssh.

I was very impressed with the reviews of the DebugClip kickstarter, in fact it sounded to good to be true.

As it was only £5.99 I took a punt.

Wow! Is this thing cool!

The Debug Clip comes as a kit that has to be soldered together but the guide http://wiki.ryanteck.uk/RTK-000-006_Soldering_Guide made that a breeze.

You can optionally power the Raspberry Pi directly from USB connection, just set the jumper to closed. Here is the clip powering my Pi. Only that single USB wire is required!





You will notice that the clip appears to be 'floating' about the GPIO pins, the early Pis had larger pins and although I could squish it down it would be a pain to remove it again. This level of contact works fine.

The second best thing about the clip is that you do not need to install anything, on either the Pi or the host Linux machine. I did not investigate connecting it to Windows or Mac machines but I can see plenty of people have.

The LEDs are a great addition and show when the serial modem is sending and receiving data.

To connect just find what serial device Linux has assigned the clip and run.

screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200

Where /dev/ttyACM0 is specific to your setup. Although I did not use it Ryanteck have script that will find the device on most setups
https://bitbucket.org/ryanteckltd/rpidebugclip/src/e881b5a63f1362abdd8b384c44ecaf1a2827589c/rpidebugclip?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default

There is a dirty little secret with the Raspberry Pi models 2 and 3 but luckily most users will never come across it. Because their CPUs are ARM7 and not ARM6 like their predecessors, you cannot use a SD card setup for ARM6 on the an ARM7. Well, until you have updated it, which I will come to.

So I took and SD card out of an Raspberry Pi B+ and put it in my 3 and it would not boot. To be more precise the HDMI output was stuck at the rainbow and the SD green LED was flashing four times slowly and four times fast, which apparently is flashing 8 times.

Quick side note, the rainbow screen is in fact just four pixels scaled up by the processor.

The fix was easy. Find an old ARM6 PI and update the card on that.

sudo apt-get update -y;sudo apt-get upgrade -y;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

even with those "-y" to force a YES answer it took hours and then did ask a question about the UDEV rule file being overwritten.

Then just put the card back in the 3 and it works. Now I can continue by 3D visualisation work with the Skywriter Hat.