Slow Sundays.

As usual I was awoken by the Magpies, who have successfully raised a screeching and slightly demented but otherwise identical copy of themselves, but in another tree after abandoning the one outside my bedroom window.

They didnt like the neighbours lol. Here's the secret to shifting a magpie for anyone interested.

Artificial light.

Flapping and shouting, chucking stuff, cats climbing in the tree, all ignored after being scolded for it. They fortified and camouflaged the nest in protest too, but carried right on.

After being woken daily by their antics, I then took to keeping them up at night (a trick that doesnt work on children, incidentally, heheh) and extending their day artificially.

They didnt like that, and off they went. But they still come back every morning to wake me up, the little b*ds. All three of them, soon as the sun comes up. Oh well...

I shooed them away and got up, and decided to uncurse another Pi... My Zero W.

Pi's are great and all, but thank you RPi Foundation for the Zero. By losing that daft pin-header and allowing me to put a socket on it to carry power and signals out thats now sensible. I cant do anything about the 3.3v GPIOs, that will just stay annoying.

There's that daft dual USB too. These guys make a shim that sorts that out, but its dead expensive for a bit of circuit board trimmed up and fitted with a plug.

Bodge, bodge, bodge

Out came the scalpel and off came the pvc round the plug. I put the other end to one side, always useful as a mini-USB breakout. Then I soldered it to a bit of board and screwed it to the Zero, and soldered it all down 'neatly'. ;-) Those screws wont come out unless I deliberately break the solder with a screwdriver, nice and solid.

All that remains are the OTG USB drivers:

Install Noobs/Raspbian and make sure SSH is enabled (it usually is)

Open config.txt and add

dtoverlay=dwc2


Open cmdline.txt and add

modules-load=dwc2,g_ether

after where is says rootwait, leaving a single space.

Now when I plug the Pi into a powered hub attached to the computer, it boots up and I can SSH and VNC into it using the address raspberrypi.local ;-)

Having swapped to a new card, Raspbian Stretch doesnt appear to like OTG very much and that doesnt do anything at all.

So I fell back to Jessie, which the instructions are for, and that doesnt work either...

It takes a long time to boot, when it does it takes out my network, and doesnt respond to SSH. Doesnt show up in

$ arp -na |grep -i b8:27

either, which should list any active Pi's on the network via their MAC, which all begin b8:27 apparently.

I also tried out the mass storage module, but that just locked up my mouse and keyboard... This is going to take some poking methinks.