Back in November, the Raspberry Pi Zero was announced, and since then, I have utterly failed to get my hands on one. Two days ago, I took a long trek on a subway, then 2.5 miles across unplowed post-blizzard streets and a park at night to get a Raspberry Pi Zero from the one nearby MicroCenter that had it in stock. I have now been trying to boot it, with a 4GB microSD card that I had loaded with Raspbian for my TI-87 project, a 16GB microSD card with nothing on it, or no microSD card at all:

1) I tried booting it with just power. Nothing happened: no LEDs lit up.
2) I tried booting it with power in the power USB port, and the other USB port plugged into a computer. Nothing happened.
3) I soldered on a USB serial adapter that I successfully used with the ODroid-W, then tried powering the Zero up. Still nothing, and nothing appeared on the serial console (serial parameters are still 115200 8N1 for the Pi Zero, from what I can find?).

Does anyone have any ideas of what I might try? I'm hoping against hope that after what I went through to get this, that it's not a dud.

I found this. Hope it helps.

Btw, you'll need to have a HDMI to mini-HDMI adapter. The HDMI side goes in a computer, or a TV. The mini-HDMI goes into the Pi.

Thanks for the link, Caleb1997; it certainly clarifies some of my questions. However, I plan to use the Pi Zero as a headless device, hence why I was trying to use a serial adapter to get a console on it in order to eventually set up SSH over WiFi and call it a day.

In that case, try this.

Unfortunately, while I wish you could do this, it's unfortunately not true unless you have a special high-end computer with an HDMI input port, or you buy an HDMI capture card. The HDMI port on almost all consumer computers is configured as an HDMI output, and cannot be used as an input.


I'm going to assume that you've checked the adapter pinout and stuff then
When you plug the Zero into power, does the activity light come on at all? The Pi Zero has no power LED, just an activity LED, and the activity LED on the Zero is inverted from what it is on the normal Pis (to cut a few components). If the SD card wasn't booting at all, then the Pi Zero's activity light would be OFF. From the RPi forums: "There was some discussion here as to whether or not enable "normal" ACT led behaviour, but it looks like they're staying with the inverted behaviour so that the ACT led acts as a pseudo power-on led too.")

Those are the correct USB parameters. Mind telling us what OS/program you are trying to access the serial port from?

Hmm, maybe the the Raspbian image on the 4GB SD card doesn't support the Pi Zero or something? I remember that when the Pi 2 came out, they added Pi 2 support to the existing Raspbian so you could swap the Pi 1 SD card to the Pi 2, but you had to do either 'sudo rpi-update' or 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' (forget which) on your old Pi to actually get the latest software with the Pi2 support.

The Pi will not do anything without a bootable SD card in it. For using the Pi headless, (unless you want to use Arch or something,) I'd recommend loading an SD card with the Lite version of the new Raspbian Jessie image, available from here. Instructions for writing the image to the SD card are available from the Raspberry Pi website for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

My bad. I meant a mini-HDMI to USB for a computer, or mini-HDMI to HDMI cable connected to a HDMI to USB adapter, connected to a computer.

More than once.

I had tried Linux with minicom when you asked that, then I tried again with Windows 10 and PuTTY with the same result, I'm afraid.

Edit: I tried plugging a microUSB cable into just the USB (non-power) port, and my Linux machine emitted the following into syslog, which this article indicates means it's not DoA:
Code:


I'll try a new image, but I'm surprised that I don't see anything on the serial console.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md
I use this a lot to set up my Pi on my own personal computer. Note: You can directly edit the interfaces file on a computer

ordelore: Thanks, once I have a little USB wireless adapter (which I failed to get when I got the Zero), I'll give that a try. In the meantime, though, I tried flashing the latest Jessie Lite version of Raspbian to my 16GB microSD card, and again, the Zero does not boot, nor do I see anything on its serial console. I'm coming to the unfortunate certainty that my Zero is DoA.

What power supply are you using?