Raspberry Pi 4 enable UART

Among the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi are two that are capable of UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter). UART is a serial connection which, when utilized on the Raspberry Pi, can send data between the Raspberry Pi and an external device. It is one of simplest connection types available on Raspberry Pi, which means it is easy to use but also more limited in functionality.

To get started with using UART, it first needs to be enabled. In this tutorial, we will go through the step by step instructions of enabling UART on the Raspberry Pi model 4. After it is enabled, you will be able to plug in your serial device and use the Raspberry Pi to issue commands and get data back from the external device. Follow along with us to see how!

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to enable UART on Rasperry Pi 4
• How to interface with serial device on UART pins

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Raspberry Pi
Software	minicom
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions	# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Enable UART for Raspberry Pi 4 – step by step instuctions

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In the steps below, you will see how to enable UART on the Raspberry Pi, and then open up a line of communication to the serial device plugged into your Raspberry Pi.

1. Start by opening a terminal and launching the Raspberry Pi configuration tool by executing the raspi-config command, then select Interface Options (number 3):

   $ sudo raspi-config
   

   

2. Next, use the arrow keys to select the ‘Serial Port’ connection:

   

3. The next option that will appear is asking if you want to have a login shell accessible over the serial connection. It is up to you how to answer this question, but we will select ‘No’.

   

4. The next menu is the critical setting. This prompt will ask you whether or not you want the serial hardware to be enabled. Select Yes and press Enter.

   

   
   

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5. The window that follows will give you a summary of the settings that were just configured. In our case, we chose to disable the serial login shell, while enabling the serial interface itself.

   

6. Select Finish on the main menu of the Raspberry Pi configuration tool, which will then give you a prompt to reboot the device. We must fully reboot for these new changes to take effect, so select Yes.

   

7. Upon loading back into the Raspberry Pi after the reboot, we can open a command line terminal and check the /boot/config.txt file to see that UART has now been enabled:

   $ tail /boot/config.txt
   ...
   enable_uart=1
   

   

8. The device path for the serial connection is /dev/ttyS0 on the Raspberry Pi 4. You can see this device by looking inside of the /dev directory:

   $ ls -l /dev/tty*
   

   

9. To begin interacting with the device, one method we can use is the minicom command. First, we must execute the following command to install the required package:

   $ sudo apt update
   $ sudo apt install minicom
   

10. After installation completes, we can interface with our serial device by executing:

    $ minicom -D /dev/ttyS0
    

    

    You can now send commands and receive data from the serial device if it is plugged into the Raspberry Pi.

Closing Thoughts

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In this tutorial, we saw how to enable UART on a Raspberry Pi 4. Enabling UART will allow users to plug in serial devices and communicate with them via GPIO pins 14 and 15. Using such external devices allows us to extend the functionality of the Raspberry Pi, making it useful for a broad number of functions that exceed basic computing and Linux in general.