Cubieboard/TTL

WARNING: DO NOT CONNECT THE RED LINE TO VCC.

Connection
If you get a USB-Serial adapter from somewhere else, please check the cable colors of it at the vendor.

The CubieBoard (Rich package) is currently supplied with a PL2303 USB cable. This cable provides VCC power on the red cable. The Cubieboard does NOT require power (red cable), and it may damage your board if connected. The CubieBoard provides a pin header with 4 pins for TTL UART connection. If you are using the supplied PL2303 cable, then the connection should be as follows:

WARNING: DO NOT CONNECT THE RED LINE TO VCC.

Availability

 * http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/TTF-to-USB-Serial-line/511685_665830339.html
 * https://www.adafruit.com/products/954

Software
cu is an utitlity that comes with popular system distributions like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, NetBSD, etc. It can be used to talk to a device connected to a serial port. On Linux with the serial cable as the only USB serial port

stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 -crtscts # turn off hardware flow control - the cable has no wires for that cu -s 115200 -l /dev/ttyUSB0

should show the u-boot and kernel messages from cubieboard.

Another option is GNU screen

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

On Windows you can use software like TeraTerm or Putty or similar which can connect over serial line.

Linux Driver

Driver for the PL2303 is inside the kernel. It will work with default settings.

OS X Driver

The opensource driver on github works and the binary version is on the link below.


 * https://github.com/downloads/berg/osx-pl2303/osx-pl2303-0.4.1-failberg.pkg (could someone confirm that this works?)

There is also a vendor-made driver;


 * Go to http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/index.aspx
 * Click support
 * Login with GUEST / GUEST
 * Click on "click here for PL2303 USB to Serial drivers"
 * half way down, download the file md_PL2303_MacOSX10.6_dmg_v1.4.0.zip

Configuration
It seems the default setting for uBoot and terminal serial is 115200 8N1

Sample output
See http://pastebin.com/p77V8xdC for sample output. It shows the boot process of the Cubieboard.