Readin' and Writin'

So one of the things that I find continually happening as I'm experimenting with the Pi model A is that I'm locked out when the WiFi doesn't connect. This happens for various different reasons. A config change being the most common culprit. Since there's only one USB port and no Ethernet that doesn't leave me with a lot of options to log in and see what's going on.

Typically when it's a desktop scenario you can connect a PL2303 to the Pi's UART and see what's going that way. But that doesn't really work in my situation since it's tough to access the pins unless I pull the covers off of Robie.

So invariably I end up yanking the power, pulling the micro SD card and then plugging it in to my model B.

The problem here is 2-fold. A) I can't see any of the logs or what caused my glitch and B) I run the risk of corrupting my disk image every time I yank the power without shutting down correctly.

The second issue I think I've solved now. Basically I've set up the Pi to be read-only except for when I run a special script. This way I can yank the power to my heart's content but nothing will be damaged on the SD card.

I primarily followed the steps here:

http://blog.pi3g.com/2014/04/make-raspbian-system-read-only/

The only thing I have to add is that the boot and root partitions were not /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/mmcblk0p2 like they mention in the post. I imagine this is because I'm running a more recent build of Raspian. Who. knows. It was a minor tweak.

So the other issue with logging in and seeing what's causing problems I'm going to try and solve with one of these:

It's called a Bluetooth ttl module (or sometimes a Bluetooth slave module). Basically it should allow me to have Bluetooth connectivity on my Pi without consuming a USB port.

I also hope to provide a way to set the WiFi parameters via the Android app using this Bluetooth module.

Whether or not I succeed or fail will be covered in another post...