Serial console

[hmuller]

Unclear at this point. I tested cable on the Debian desktop installed on microSD. Tomorrow I will look at the default installation on eMMC, and then at ayufan's bionic on microSD. Will let you know the results.

I've also been struggling to use the UART cable.

It appears that the PBP is detecting that the cable is attached and behaving differently when the cable is attached. In my case "differently" means the system won't boot correctly and locks up instead

It is not the presence of the jack that causes the system to hang. It only hangs when the adapter is attached to the USB host. I'm thinking of hacking together a custom cable try and stop the PBP detecting that someone is listening to the UART messages...

So... after a bit of experimenting I gave up on my official pine64 UART cable and soldered together something of my own instead (which sounds grander than it is... in reality it is just a stereo jack soldered to jumper cables). It looks like my official cable doesn't work with the PBP but the UART is working just fine using my breakout cable and an off-the-shelf (3.3v) TTL UART I had lying around.

If you are running the factory image (and have opened up the case and set the selector switch to UART mode) then you should see something on the UART as the image boots. The kernel is configured with a very high logging threshold so you won't see any kernel messages... but there are a few messages as systemd boots then then a getty (login prompt) comes up.

I had issues with my serial cable in the beginning too. It wasn't being recognized by the USB subsystem. I later determined that it was the USB connector on the cable, it either wasn't seating properly, or the contacts were not clean. It had since been operating normally.

I have added this information to the wiki.