Raspberry Pi 3 img?

OK! Well, that must be the problem, then. I'd have not thought of that without your help. Yes, I am trying to use the HDMI console. Actually, I was hoping to boot it completely headless, and do everything via SSH. Maybe I'll just unplug the HDMI and keyboard and mouse and see what happens with Ethernet only. You see, I only have ONE USB/RS-232 adapter.... So if I plug that into the PI, then I don't have an RS-232 capable laptop anymore... So, maybe I'll have to go out and buy a second USB/RS-232 adapter - which seems a little silly: Pi3 <-> USB <-> RS-232 splicer <-> USB <-> laptop.... And I still don't understand why Windows doesn't see the FAT32 boot partition... Mystery upon mystery... But THANK YOU for this help! I really appreciate it.

I was able to make RPi3 from RaspBSD operational without a serial console. It's like shooting birds at night, but I had some success:
  1. Boot it with Ethernet connected.
  2. Go to your DHCP server and see what IP your RPi negotiated. If your dynamic DNS registration works you should be able to "ping rpi3". "rpi3" is the default hostname. Remember to flush your local DNS cache if necessary.
  3. SSH to raspberry@rpi3 or raspberry@<ip address>
  4. sudo root
  5. Configure static IP, etc. and reboot ...
I was dismayed not to have HDMI support at first too. But when I thought about it - the serial console is so much better for headless embedded solutions. You can connect to your RPi using a laptop and a cheap USB-to-serial cable. Makes it easy to service it in-place at those remote corners of your house.

I am using USB-to-serial cable like this: https://www.adafruit.com/products/954 (got mine from China web store for less than $5 - but waited for it to arrive more than a month)

Instructions are here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection
 
OK. Time for me to eat some crow. It was my process all along. The windows dd is apparently just not the tool for the job. I switched from using "dd" to Win32 ImageWriter, and now it boots just fine, and shows a FAT32 file system from windows. Hopefully, someone can learn from my experience! Do not use windows "dd" to write the .img file to the SD card. Use ImageWriter instead. I booted it with and without the HDMI/USB keyboard. It is running with neither right now - I booted it with only network and power, and am managing it via SSH.

Thanks to all who took the time to read and consider my situation!

Now - in the meantime, I got rather fond of the Raspbian GUI environment. Might have to buy myself another Pi for that as this one has a purpose. Is there a project to get that running on RaspBSD? Maybe I could contribute?
 
Maybe this isn't the right group to be chronicling this, but I wanted to document this somewhere. "pkg update" ran out of space in /tmp, which I was was a memory disk, so I simply dismounted it, then I was able to do the "pkg update" (after following the directions on http://www.raspbsd.org/raspberrypi.html to make sure that I got the FreeBSD 11 packages and for the right processor architecture).
 
I can't get pkg working at all. I also ran out of space in /tmp when building octoprint from git.

Has anyone been able to get BSD to boot via USB? I can do it with Linux. SD cards are slow and unreliable, so I'd like to skip them.
 
I also ran out of space in /tmp when building octoprint from git.

Turning off all RAM mounted filesystems in /etc/fstab is one of my first things to do when preparing an RPi. Even pkg install fail on me when /tmp is so small.

I can't get pkg working at all.

Following the instructions published at RaspBSD, I can get pkg to bootstrap and work. Here are the instructions:
To bootstrap pkg, run:

Code:
env ABI=FreeBSD:11:aarch64 pkg bootstrap
To set up pkg to use the 11 repo, add the following to your /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf:

Code:
ABI = "FreeBSD:11:aarch64";
 
I tried those raspBSD instructions. It didn't work. I'll give you the error message when I get home later. I'm leaving it building ports right now.
 
I tried those raspBSD instructions. It didn't work. I'll give you the error message when I get home later. I'm leaving it building ports right now.

Keep in mind the 313109 release is unstable. I got random core dumps while compiling: Raspberry Pi 3 img?

The 313772 indeed fixed the crashing. Unfortunately, images I prepare using crochet does not load I2C and bcm2835_cpufreq0 drivers. Brad Davis of RaspBSD must have tweaked the image somehow. I am trying to get thru to him to get some help...
 
I was able to make octoprint compile by using an external USB drive with a 2 gig partition as the replacement /tmp. ran fine after that.
 
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Nope, it does not fix it. Comparing dmesg:
  • The RaspBSD image loads the I2C and bcm2835_cpufreq0 device drivers.
  • Stock FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT r314948 still doesn't. I believe I should configure kernel or U-Boot somehow to force it to load bcm2835_cpufreq0.
Code:
# service powerd start
Starting powerd.
powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory
/etc/rc.d/powerd: WARNING: failed to start powerd
 
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