Save your sanity: If you buy a PBP, buy a serial adapter and USB to eMMC adapter.
#1
It's about $15.

One thing I'm seeing, fairly consistently, is problems on the forum that are borderline impossible to troubleshoot without serial output.

Due to how the PBP brings up the display, it has to get quite far into the boot process before you'll see anything beyond the status LED.  Troubleshooting "LED comes on, nothing else happens" without the serial output is both challenging and frustrating.

With the serial output from the various stages of boot firmware and potentially early kernel, troubleshooting becomes very straightforward, because all the stages are fairly verbose and tell you what's wrong if they can't proceed.

Also, given the boot ROM's rather odd preference to pull firmware from the eMMC before searching the SD card, a corrupt eMMC will easily prevent the system from booting, and it's quite annoying to correct.

With a UART and the USB eMMC adapter, both of these problem classes become radically easier to troubleshoot and fix.

So buy (or build) the proper adapters.  Please.  It's still very much beta, rough around the edges hardware in early boot, and it would be really nice to be able to be more helpful.


Messages In This Thread
Save your sanity: If you buy a PBP, buy a serial adapter and USB to eMMC adapter. - by Syonyk - 06-29-2020, 11:13 AM

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