[arm-allstar] Enabling a serial console

[Stephen - K1LNX]

Thought I'd throw this out there for anyone that may need it. I run my Pi
headless, and sometimes it will lose network connectivity due to config
issues or my upstream provider in the cloud, I run my ham stuff on 44 net
and have my own subnet.

I had just this situation the other day and got to thinking, wouldn't it be
nice if I had a way to get to this without a keyboard/monitor? I've done
this in the past with a USB TTL adapter, but I also have a digi terminal
server in my repeater rack that has serial consoles to other gear that I
can reach remotely and that led me to thinking about finding a TTL to
serial adapter, so I searched away on Amazon and there are tons, I
purchased this particular one:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078N1TZY4

Install was easy, but one caveat I found was that on the Raspberry Pi 3 B
(which is what I'm running), bluetooth shares the UART onboard, but can be
disabled easily.

Here's what I did to make this work:

Wire up the adapter like so:

adapter



Pi GPIO

VCC          <-------->  DC Power 5v (pin 04)

GND         <-------->  Ground (pin 06)

TXD          <-------->  RXD0 (GPIO15/pin 10)

RXD          <-------->  TXD0 (GPIO14/pin 8)

Edit /boot/config.txt and add the following line, this will disable
bluetooth altogether, which was not a deal breaker for me as I won't be
using it with this board anyhow:

dtoverlay=pi3-dsable-bt


Hope this helps someone.


73

Stephen

K1LNX