I confirmed today that the new Pi-Zero (super cheap/ super small new Raspberry Pi) works with AlaMode. As in the B+, the new GPIO connector is bigger than the old, but it’s less of a problem on the Pi-zero because of it’s small size. It’s a little hard to get a Pi-zero these days, but I managed to snag one as part of a “starter kit” from Adafruit, and since I needed the HDMI and USB OTG adapters anyway, It wasn’t a bad deal.

A help desk request came in saying there was something wrong with setup, and it turns out they changed the way startup happens in Raspbian between Wheezy and Jessie. Now getty is a simple service, and all startup services are controlled with systemctl

No more inittab, but you can download the new setup script: https://github.com/wyolum/alamode/blob/master/alamode-setup/jessie-setup
instead of sudo ./setup, do sudo ./jessie-setup

I’ll eventually work the code back into regular setup, but I need to brush up on my bash-fu (unless someone else in the community wants to help?)

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I grabbed a couple of the Pi 2’s as soon as I could, and started testing with AlaMode. First, the new Pi 2 is quite snappy, even the web browser is quite useable. It should be a marvelous platform for your IOT projects! Especially with AlaMode.

It has the same form factor as the B+ so you have to plug the AlaMode’s shorter GPIO connector into one end of the header, and the board overlaps the connector end of the Pi by a few millimeters. I recommend putting some electrical tape over the metal cans of the connectors to keep from shorting AlaMode’s headers.

Because the Pi 2 has a new processor, the GPIO base addressed changed, which makes us update our patched version of avrdude. (needed because standard Arduinos use serial ports handshaking to toggle the reset line, we use a GPIO pin)

Though there’s not a lot of doc out on the Pi 2 (it’s mostly completely backward compatible) the helpful folks on the Raspberry Pi forum gave me all the info I needed, including some code to detect which version of Pi you are running on.

Get the new setup here:

[code]wget https://github.com/wyolum/alamode/blob/master/bundles/alamode-setup.tar.gz?raw=true
tar -xvzf alamode-setup.tar.gz
cd alamode-setup
sudo ./setup[/code]

Note if you haven’t already, you’ll need a new version of Raspbian that supports the Pi2, plus installing Arduino before running the setup above.

I messed up checking in the changes to support NOOBS for alamode setup.

It’s all checked in now. The new setup bundle is at: http://git.io/alamode-setup

The original post is still correct in explainging the changes.

When the NOOBs method of creating an SD card for Raspberry Pi came out, we began to get reports that the AlaMode setup caused the Pi to crash (kernal panic, etc.)

At the time, I didn’t have time to look at it and just recommended sticking to the pure Raspbian image.

AlaMode setup now works for NOOBS as well as Raspbian. Updated links, and instructions are on the getting started page  You can grab the updated setup bundle at:
http://git.io/alamode-setup

Note that this script references install locations for the Arduino IDE that have only been verified for the Raspbian distro. NOOBS allows you to install other distros, but this will probably only work for the raspbian option (tested) and the other raspbian variants (such as scratch).

The problem was in turning off the console output to the serial port (used for programming AlaMode) we overwrote the cmdline.txt which controls booting. Because NOOBS isn’t a pure linux image, the partitioning of the SD card is different, and the referenced device for where the linux Kernel lives was incorrect (it was correct for pure Raspbian).

If you’re curious, this was fixed by using sed (stream editor) to remove the console references, leaving partitioning references intact.