develop/testing setup for pi?

Hi,

on working on migration of radxa penta-sata tower to libreElec I killed my pi. The plenty changes and each time unplug the sata daughter board change sdcard and plug the sata daughter board again killed the plug of the internal cable and then probabely the pi (caused by wrong placement of the rotten plug).

So I'd like to know, how you developers work on images for the pi or similar boxes. Working on images is sometimes tedious and cumbersome, but fiddling with weak hardware is not funny at all.

Is there a way to change boot images without touching hardware?

And how to you reboot?

Pi does not have a reset button ...

I read about booting support from usb and network - usb needs lot of plug changes too, so may be network may be the way to go?

How do you get rid of all that weakness?

Thank you both for your answers!

The replacement pi has arrived - and I'm desperately disappointed - it does not work, as the other one I had before. Whatever image I tried (of those that worked with the rockpi4 before) does not work. No picture, no whatever ...

Is it possible, that I got broken hardware? I bought from allnet directly.

Such a pain in the ass ...

... or could it be a PEBCAK? Is there anything I can do wrong?

With the first rockpi I had no problems bringing any of the images into play.

Cable and monitor are ok, as a pi3 works fine with the same cables.

Quote from popcornmix

Were the old and new Pi's Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi? The two are very different and need different images.

If that's the only chance for a pebcak, then I'm save. They both where Rockpi and I only build images for rock pi.

Quote from HiassofT

I'm netbooting my RPi4 and have a serial console attached.

That's very interesting. I'd like to read more about this setup.

Currently I'm unsure, whether to buy a rockpi again -

but I have the towers and a really like the idea of such a small nas that is capable to act as media client ...

The pi was in the living room connected to beamer, surround receiver and cable network. I connected via ssh from my desktop pc. That was ok for research. Only changing image was a pain.

I never used network booting - where do I select the boot image?

Does the client offer a listing of boot images like grub or so or do I have to change server setup to offer the client a new/different image?

I guess, the latter would be handier, as I could change boot image without leaving desktop