The Raspberry Pi serial port is almost useful...

If you’ve ever played with a Raspberry Pi you’ll be familiar with the annoying way you have to configure the device before you can use it.

You might have no intention of using your shiny new Pi Zero W with a keyboard, screen and mouse but to get it set up you have to connect them all.

I thought I’d found the answer to my problems in the form of these serial connectors. You can connect them to the serial port pins on your Pi, plug the other end into your PC, fire up a terminal program (I use PuTTY) and then use the command line interface to set everything up.

A while back this would have been an excellent idea. Unfortunately modern versions of the Pi operating system are a bit more security conscious than the older ones, and disable the serial port command line by default.

So if you want to use this cable you have to use a mouse, keyboard and screen to turn it on and enable the serial console…… Oh well. It will still be useful for “on the fly” modifications.