I had this nagging feeling that somewhere in amongst all of my boxes of bits and pieces there would be something serial cable related.
Well, it turns out that in one forgotten box in one forgotten cupboard I did have exactly what I needed - an old serial cable (from a digital camera, I think) and an rj45-to-db9 serial connector which still had all the wires unconnected.
After a little bit of testing and a little bit of soldering, I now have myself a null modem cable!
To use this cable, one end plugs into the baseboard, and the other end plugs into a USB-to-Serial adapter. This allows me to use my Macbook, which has no serial ports.
The samples include a simple little app just for testing serial. As I'm on a mac, I decided to use CoolTerm (instead of Hyperterminal).
And it works! Hooray! high-five-to-myself!
The only issue I ran into is that the camera seems to interfere. Which I guess I should have known, because the camera example says to make sure JP1/JP2 are unconnected, while the serial example says the opposite.
That's unfortunately, as it would have been nice to have access to that serial port while working with the rest of the hardware.
Anyhow, looks like I'm back in business again - with this serial cable I can proceed to testing the SD card...
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