A Zero W followed me home...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 10:28 am Post subject:

eccerr0r,

I found I needed the boot flag on the boot partition.

You can cheat a little. Add your gentoo kernel to raspbian an edit /boot/config.txt to boot it.
Never mind the modules, all you want to see is the panic message on the Gentoo kernel serial console
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 1:38 pm Post subject:

Why I came to the conclusion - raspbian doesn't have any partitions flagged!
ohhh this is giving me a headache...

Yeah I was thinking about just using the raspbian boot, but I wanted a cleanroom setup to make sure I can replicate installing reliably without it... makes no sense to me right now as I thought I tried all the fat16/32 permutations burning out my endurance on my microsd card...

Need to find another card to try stuff so I can easily refer back to raspbian....
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 1:52 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r,

You can still do the clean room set up. Piggy backing on Raspbian as a testbed lets you test all the bits separately before you put them together in your cleanroom.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

crocket · Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2017 Posts: 558

Is it possible to turn the microUSB port of Raspberry Pi Zero into a serial port?

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2019 12:58 pm Post subject:

You can always connect an OTG connector to a USB-to-RS232 adapter, but you need a large software stack to support it, making it questionable for use as a console (keep it simple!!!)
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erm67 · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2005 Posts: 653 Location: EU

Apparently you can use the OTG on the pi zero as a console without a converter:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/pull/1239

it's because there isn't an hub connected to it like on the other PI
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eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2019 12:26 am Post subject:

Yeah the USB gadget support on this thing opens a lot of possibilities... If you don't have an OTG cable or a serial converter, make the whole pi zero board into a serial converter and use console that way...ha.

(and even better, could make the pi itself into a complete USB serial converter complete with built in protocol logger...)
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Gavinmc42 · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2019 Posts: 21 Location: Brisbane

I'm new to Gentoo but not to Pi's.

I have been using USB booting Zero for baremetal VC4 code testing for some time.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/usbboot
It saves lots of messing about with uSD cards too.

I have also managed to load a PiCore linux kernel via OTG USBboot too.

Using the OTG port work as a comms port after it has booted is a bit harder.
I have a suspicion the port is still set up as a comms port after booting the kernel.
But because OTG is buried inside the SoC and undocumented there is some reverse engineering needed.
This would actually help Pi4 coders too as the same OTG port is on the USB-C connector.

OTG booting should work on the Compute Modules too, I have not checked there for clues.

It would be nice to get this working for Zero's then they could be used as Displaylink type Display drivers.
Get a third display working on Pi4's using a Zero on a USB port?
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