Serial on Raspberry Pi Arch Linux

So the new version of Arch Linux doesn’t have runlevels, rc.d or any of that nonsense any more. It just has systemd. Super simple if you know how to use it, but a right pain in the backside if you don’t.

I have a little serial GPS module hooked up to my Raspberry Pi via the hardware serial port (ttyAMA0). My old instructions for getting this to work aren’t much use any more. Here’s the new procedure for getting serial data with the minimum of fuss:

1. Disable serial output during boot

Edit /boot/cmdline.txt using your favourite editor. I like nano these days.

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

Remove all chunks of text that mention ttyAMA0 but leave the rest of the line intact. Bits to remove look like:

console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200

2. Disable the console on the serial port

This was the new bit for me. The process used to involve commenting out a line in /etc/innitab but that file is long gone.

Systemd uses links in /etc to decide what to start up, so once you find the right one, removing it is easy. You can find the files associated with consoles by doing:

ls /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/

One of the entries clearly refers to ttyAMA0. It can be removed using the following command:

sudo systemd disable serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service

3. Check you’re getting data

I used minicom for this as it’s very simple to use. First of all, make sure you plug in your device (with the power off, if you’re as clumsy as me!).

sudo pacman -S minicom

minicom -b 4800 -o -D /dev/ttyAMA0

You should see a lovely stream of data. I my case it was a screen full of NMEA sentences. Great stuff!