Pi Zero W – PiDashCam Part 2

There will be a longer post about the newly released Pi Zero W, however suffice to say as soon as I saw it was available it was ordered, and I now have one!

There has been a few changes to the PiDashCam project, which has included moving to the Pi Zero when v1.3 was released (As it had a camera connector on the board). I missed my opportunity to write about those updates!

The Pi Zero W uses a similar set up to the Pi 3, in that the built-in bluetooth capabilities use the hardware UART, which means that my UART GPS receiver wont work.

As it is so similar to the Pi 3 (excluding the memory and processor) the current Device Tree for disabling bluetooth on the Pi 3 works for the Pi Zero W.

I’ve included some code below. This starts from a fresh install and allows you to use the hardware UART of the Pi Zero W and disables bluetooth on that board.

I hope it helps someone! (Also, feel free to replace vi with nano – I’m trying to teach myself Vim).

sudo vi /boot/cmdline.txt

in this file, remove the following text:

console=serial0,115200

Save and close the file. Next up,

sudo vi /boot/config.txt

and add the following to the end of the file:

enable_uart=1
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

Next, it’s these three quick commands which includes a reboot of the Pi Zero W, which enables hardware UART:

sudo systemctl stop [email protected]

sudo systemctl disable [email protected]

sudo reboot

To complete the GPS side of things however, continue with the following:

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients python-gps

sudo systemctl stop gpsd.socket

sudo systemctl disable gpsd.socket

and finally,

sudo killall gpsd

sudo gpsd /dev/ttyAMA0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

cgps

which should see you getting data from the GPS Receiver.

Thanks to Adafruit for their existing tutorial, and the Raspberry Pi github/forums and IRC for the Device Tree information.