Nerves on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W does not boot

What have you tried after seeing the green LED? I think there might be some misconception here:

• For this target, HDMI is disabled by default. You will most likely not get any output from there
• These do not follow the LED patterns defined by Raspian OS. A solid green is the expected output on startup
• You should be able to ping nerves.local or see that the device is connected over network if you are using the middle USB port of the rpi0 or USB A port of rpi3a

Can you take a look over Connecting to a Nerves target and try some of the suggestions there to see if maybe the device is actually working properly?

Or if needed, you can configure WiFi when burning the circuits quickstart image to an SD card. You could try that as well and see if the new device joins your network

Dam thanks for quick reply.

So doing the circuits quickstart image just now

$ export NERVES_WIFI_SSID='FreshTomato24'
$ export NERVES_WIFI_PASSPHRASE='password'

$ sudo fwup circuits_quickstart_rpi3a.fw
Use 15.93 GB memory card found at /dev/sdb? [y/N] y
100% [====================================] 25.07 MB in / 27.76 MB out
Success!
Elapsed time: 3.902 s

popped it in the Pi and the green LED did exaclty this

• Green for about a second
• Off half a second say
• Green for about seven seconds
• Then just off permanently

So this probably is not expected to work

$ ping nerves.local
ping: nerves.local: Name or service not known

$ ssh nerves.local
ssh: Could not resolve hostname nerves.local: Name or service not known

It is not listed in the WiFi devices dashboard

Other notes I do not really have access to a USB to TTL cable for serial connection at the moment and it is definitely plugged into middle USB port and not “pwr in” one

Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?

Are you able to confirm that your USB cable supports data and power? It’s really common now to have power only USB cables (especially if from a cheap bin or off the shelf grab) - so much so that I invested in a USB tester just for this purpose.

Trying several different USB cables might be the next step. You can also enable the HDMI output temporarily if you have an adapter

Are you able to confirm that your USB cable supports data and power?
so much so that I invested in a USB tester just for this purpose.

Can not really confirm I guess… Though I definitely agree with the second part because I simply can not find a way to easily identify one from the other visually or by sense of smell

However, I have tried three separate cables ( pretty much all I could find around the house ) and one of which actually transfers images from an old android phone so I have to believe that one is at least data sensitive

In fact… I am basically only working through

And they recommend a ( seemingly ) data USB capable cable in the notes that I bought specifically to avoid lame ass problems like this

Because I just want to tool around with nerves and IoT.

I am even questioning whether or not I bought or received a Pi zero 2 W at this point but it looks like it is. It is printed on the board

You can also enable the HDMI output temporarily if you have an adapter

I did do this with rpi0 and it hung at the rainbow splash screen. Obviously the wrong MIX_TARGET

How would you recommend going about this HDMI output otherwise?

Still use the circuit quickstart image?

An update…

In config.txt I set

disable_splash=0
enable_uart=0

For both export MIX_TARGET=rpi3a and $ sudo fwup circuits_quickstart_rpi3a.fw

And both just keep rebooting over and over.

• Splashes the rainbow image
• Cursor in upper left corner
• Repeat

Yea so no idea

There a debug mode?

What host OS are you using to build and burn firmware?

I just tried the rpi3a firmware from your original post and it successfully booted. Once running, the green LED turns completely off.

I also did not have success using export for the WiFi settings and sudo burn task. It needed to be within the same command and I needed to force the WiFi settings

NERVES_WIFI_SSID="test" NERVES_WIFI_PASSPHRASE="somepass" NERVES_WIFI_FORCE="true" fwup circuits_quickstart_rpi3a.fw

Trying that again with NERVES_WIFI_FORCE is worth a try. Depending on your host, you might need a driver installed to see a device over OTG.

Investing in a simple USB TTY serial cable is also very useful for these smaller devices. If you want the output on the HDMI, then you’ll need to enable it in erlinit.config instead of the UART pins

Not saying this is the case, but that could be a power supply issue.

How are you powering the board?

The “official” rpi zero-2 W PSUs are rated at 5V 2.5A.

I was having a similar problem with connecting to a raspberry pi with a Nerves project.

Config:
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
Windows 11 running WSL2
MIX_TARGET = rpi3a
Using the instructions from the “Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves”

The main issue was that I was unable to ping or ssh to the device over USB. I tried multiple USB cables, confirmed I was using the gadget port (not the power only port), tried another firmware file (circuits_quickstart_rpi3a.fw) from GitHub - elixir-circuits/circuits_quickstart: Try out Elixir Circuits on Nerves! · GitHub, all unsuccessfully.

I also tried several attempts at getting mDNS/zeroconf/Bonjour working on both WSL2 and Windows 11, which I thought might be part of the problem. I learned some things, but didn’t solve the problem.

One solution proposed here seemed promising, which was to set the NERVES_WIFI_SSID and _PASSWORD as env variables or pass them as arguments to fwup. However, due to how WSL2 works, with limited access to MicroSD cards, mix burn passes this off to fwup.exe on the Windows side, so the arguments and env vars are not honored, as far as I can tell.

My solution was to configure WiFi in advance, before creating the firmware file, by updating config/target.exs in the project. By adding my wireless ssid and psk to the wlan0 section, the RPi pulled an address through dhcp and I could ssh/ping it over WiFi.

This is basically the instructions from the book mentioned above and the VintagetNetDirect site (GitHub - nerves-networking/vintage_net_wifi: WiFi networking for VintageNet · GitHub), doing it before you burn the firmware.

To be more explicit, assuming you have the “sensor_hub” project from the book all set up, edit the config/target.exs file ensuring it has a section that looks like this (there might be other interfaces in there, like usb0 and eth0, that’s fine:

config :vintage_net,
  config: [
    {"wlan0",
      %{
        type: VintageNetWiFi,
        vintage_net_wifi: %{
          networks: [
            %{
              key_mgmt: :wpa_psk,
              ssid: "my_network_ssid",
              psk: "a_passphrase_or_psk",
            }
          ]
        },
        ipv4: %{method: :dhcp},
      }
    }
  ]

Then run mix firmware and mix burn as usual. Swap the SD card to the pi. In my case it has a steady green LED. I checked my router for devices pulling addresses and after a tense few moments, “nerves-8821” showed up on my network, and was able to ssh to the device.

I hope that helps someone else.

Hi there, I’m trying to do the same but without the sd card as instructed here GitHub - nerves-livebook/nerves_livebook: Develop on embedded devices with Livebook and Nerves · GitHub the last line of the log is fwup: Expecting platform=rpi3a and architecture=arm

 ✗ mix firmware.gen.script
===> Analyzing applications...
===> Compiling certifi
==> nerves
===> Analyzing applications...
===> Compiling certifi
===> Analyzing applications...
===> Compiling certifi
===> Analyzing applications...
===> Compiling certifi
==> nerves_livebook

Nerves environment
  MIX_TARGET:   rpi3a
  MIX_ENV:      dev

OK to overwrite upload.sh? [Yn] Y
Writing upload.sh...

(base) ➜  nerves_livebook git:(main) ✗ ./upload.sh livebook@nerves.local
Path: ./_build/rpi3a_dev/nerves/images/nerves_livebook.fw
Product: nerves_livebook 0.12.1
UUID: 0ef7bcd8-....
Platform: rpi3a

Uploading to livebook@nerves.local...
Nerves Livebook
https://github.com/nerves-livebook/nerves_livebook

ssh livebook@nerves-5ae6.local # Use password "nerves"

(livebook@nerves.local) Password: 
fwup: Expecting platform=rpi3a and architecture=arm

I have tried with rpi3a and rpi0 same result.

This is what I get from running ssh nerves.local and executing dmesg

[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0000000000 [0x410fd034]
[    0.000000] Linux version 6.1.63-v8 (buildroot@buildroot) (aarch64-nerves-linux-gnu-gcc (crosstool-NG UNKNOWN) 13.2.0, GNU ld (crosstool-NG UNKNOWN) 2.40) #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jan  5 01:01:11 UTC 2024
[    0.000000] random: crng init done
[    0.000000] Machine model: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Rev 1.0
[    0.000000] Reserved memory: created CMA memory pool at 0x000000000bc00000, size 128 MiB
[    0.000000] OF: reserved mem: initialized node linux,cma, compatible id shared-dma-pool

Could you ssh into the device and either look at the message of the day or run Nerves.Runtime.KV.get_active("nerves_platform"):

image1200×788 68.6 KB

That will tell you which image matches what’s running on your device.

If this doesn’t point out why the firmware update platform check failed, then please post what you see and I’ll try to think about how this could have happened.