hi if you review this thread, the earlier comments, you would notice that there are quite varous discussions about DTS overlays for the gpio headers. noticably discussions from / between
@Gunjan Gupta @pixdrift @Stephen Graf. Unfortunately, it seemed for now not all the changes have made it into the trunk.
there are also various discussions about libgpiod and gpiod, hope those may help with access to the pins.
rather than to use HDMI and a monitor, I used a usb-uart (usb-serial) dongle
that lets me connect over the serial console with the debug pins and I'm literally able to boot up in a serial console and (even) configure networking, i.e. I didn't even need network and can change the network interface configurations. That would also be a way to troubleshoot boot up problems if there is. I used the serial debug pins/console to configure networking as more than often, the default setup of network isn't what I want, and playing with the network interfaces will lock me out of ssh.
After I've network configured over usb-uart, I can then ssh remotely into the device over the network.
And that if you use dynamic IP, it may help to install and use avahi-daemon and avahi-tools (i.e. multicast DNS), I installed avahi-daemon on the OPi Z3 Armbian board so that I can find it from my main linux box using avahi-browse -a , and that ssh into there could be simply ssh orangepizero3.local
that's a way to practically use it headless , in fact, after I've setup things, it is now my WiFi AP on the desk.
