Just bought a new Raspberry Pi 3 with WIFI and Bluetooth?  Using it in a project with serial? Happy?

Well, you might not be so happy when you find out what I just found out.  I had my Node-Red project that has been controlling the house for around 18 months on a Pi2 and I was starting to have issues –  I thought it time to upgrade. So I made a new installation, faithfully copied everything over, plugged in the board… everything was fine.

Except it wasn’t – nothing was coming out of the serial port. Well, it turns out they stole the serial port for the Bluetooth. There is a second port – of a kind – which can be set to work with the GPIO pins 14 and 15…  but Node-Red serial node was NOT having it – I put a scope on the output – nothing.  I followed instructions to use an alternative “serial port” – which appeared and – the Node-Red Serial port input would not recognise it.

Anyway, it isn’t all bad – thanks to Dave at IBM who put me onto this link…

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/45570/how-do-i-make-serial-work-on-the-raspberry-pi3

Ignore most of the content and head to the end – Answer number FIVE.  This got me back up and running with a high speed serial port – but – no Bluetooth of course. I’m assuming I can just stick in a Bluetooth dongle – time will tell.

Essentially assuming an up to date Pi3, the key line is the one where you add

dtoverlay=pi3-miniuart-bt”"

to the /boot/config.txt file.

I’m liking FriendlyArm more and more (I’d like them even MORE if they’d put more RAM in their boards) but at least, for today, I’m up and running.