Have a new toy - RPI-Console

I have a new toy in my arsenal, this is the RPI-Console from land-boards that I received when making a contribution to Kickstarter.  I was looking for a device to use at work (or home) to update software on a Raspberry Pi without having to have a connection to a monitor or keyboard/mouse.  Then the RPI-Console showed up on Kickstarter and met most of my needs.  I can now use my laptop keyboard/screen to interface with the console on the RPi, including powering the RPi from the USB port on my laptop.  This the smaller version and I have a 40 pin version which I also received as part of the Kickstarter promotion.


As you can see from the next picture, I have been using this at the office to work on an RPi2 during lunch.  I just take the cover off of the RPi2 case and plug the RPI-Console into it, plug the USB cable and fire up a copy of Putty on my laptop; instant console!  I have been able to run raspi-config from the console to get the microSD card setup, and further setup things so that I can update the RPi2 software through a wireless bridge (not shown in the picture).


I have been impressed with the quality of the board and with the "open kimono" approach that Land-Boards have with their products.  They even have a wiki page which details the testing that they put each board through; a quality job throughout!  I like the fact that the design has a couple of LEDs to indicate serial traffic, receive and transmit, and the fact that you can choose to power from the USB cable or not by a jumper.  The extended pins are a nice touch and allow you to get at the GPIO as needed.

For me this is an ideal interface and reduces the amount of things that I bring into work to be able to do a lunchtime activity. Should the power requirements be more than the USB cable can handle, you can always set the jumper to bring power via the microUSB interface.

Update: I was also successfully able to put a PiTFT onto the RPi2, run a ribbon cable from the additional connector, and plug the RPI-Console into it.  It was also able to power the whole thing including two Netgear wifi adapters.  I think that I am going to be very happy with this purchase.

Stupid RPi Tip #5 - Conversion of SD Cards

I was able to convert an SD card from an RPi B (my work MediaPi) to a micro-SD card for an RPi B+.  I had gone through the trouble of putting some drivers on the regular 8GB SD card and I didn't want to lose the configurations that had already been done when converting over to an RPi B+.  The key to all of this was the use of Win32 Disk Imager and raspi-config.  The normal use of the Win32 Disk Imager is explained below:

Using Win32 Disk Imager
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*** extracting an image file from an SD card ***
-- launch Win32 Disk Imager
-- load SD card
-- switch dropdown on right to the SD card that was loaded
-- select the file folder icon
--- go to the directory that you want and set a file name <filename>.img
--- click OK
-- you should see the location for the image file filled in, and Device being SD card
-- click on the Read button
-- when the file is finished, exit the program
-- you now have an image file of the SD card

-----------------------------------
*** pushing an image file to an SD card ***
-- launch Win32 Disk Imager
-- load SD card
-- switch dropdown on right to the SD card that was loaded
-- select the file folder icon
--- go to the directory with the image file, select it
--- click OK
-- you should see the location for the image file filled in, and Device being SD card
-- click on the Write button
-- when the file is finished writing to the SD card, exit the program
-- you now have an SD card with the image written on it

I followed the directions above marked "extracting an image file from an SD card" with the 8GB SD card to make an image.  I then followed the "pushing an image file to an SD card" with the 16GB micro-SD card to copy that image.  Once the RPi B+ system booted up, I then used raspi-config to expand the image to fill the entire micro-SD.  Problem solved - now back to troubleshooting.  I think I am now going to work on an SSH tunnel back to my house.