Raspberry Pi - Linux

[Coldwilson]

Over at the following site there's an interview with the founder of Raspberry Pi. 

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/pcs/2012/01/26/raspberry-pi-modders-dream-machine/3

 

An interesting section to note is the bit about support on Ubuntu and Debian as quoted below:

 

Initially built around the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution from Canonical, the company’s decision to cease development of the ARMv6 branch of the code in favour of ARMv7 - incompatible with the Broadcom SoC at the heart of the Raspberry Pi - means that alternatives have been found. ‘Red Hat has been extremely helpful to us,’ Upton told us. ‘There’s at least one distribution keeping its ARMv5/ARMv6 line alive specifically in order to help us, which isn't a cost free exercise.’

 

I guess people will find a way to have Ubuntu or Debian running on it but this is the first time I've seen an issue about it.

[Coldwilson]

Hi guys,

 

I've got my order in for the Raspberry Pi and now also got it all working great on the Beagleboard having moved to Ubuntu.  The Beaglebone was too much of a technical challenge tying to get it working on Angstrom for me.

 

So I see that Raspberry Pi will have Fedora and probably others over time and I know you're looking to get one as well.  When you get your hands on one can you confirm that the packages needed for your bricks (things like like Python-gudev, Python-twisted, and your brickd packages) all work with the base build?

 

Thanks

[borg]

We ordered one, not sure if we actually will get one now or if they  sold out before we ordered.

 

But we will definitely try to get brickd working on it, the Raspberry Pi is an obvious choice to control Bricks with :-).

[SN]

Hi, I've chased a link of the raspberry pi forums to here and I have to say that the Brick architecture looks an excellent fit for plugging into a raspi - there are debian and fedora remix distros already available for the raspi (and running in QEMU) - can anyone point me to:

1. Concise description of the software architecture (on a Linux host)

2. Concise description of the capabilities of the 'Bricks'

 

Many thanks

Steve N (SN on http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum)

[borg]

1. Concise description of the software architecture (on a Linux host)

It is fairly simple. We have a Brick Daemon, a Brick Viewer and language bindings. The daemon has a USB connection to the Bricks (and over the Bricks to the Bricklets) and opens a TCP port. The bindings (currently for C/C++, C#, Java, Python) speak over TCP with the Brick Daemon and provide an API to the user (like SetSpeed, GetTemperature, etc). That is in principle all you need to use Bricks and Bricklets (the Brick Daemon and one language binding).

 

Additionally we have the Brick Viewer, that provides a GUI for all of the API for all Bricks/Bricklets. The idea is to use it for testing before you start your own project.

 

2. Concise description of the capabilities of the 'Bricks'

A list of devices that we currently have can be found here: http://www.tinkerforge.com/doc/index.html#bricks

You can click on the names to get an in depth description.

[Xenna]

Well, I received my Raspberry Pi from Farnell this week. Actually my second, but the first one from RS Online was broken. It loses USB and ethernet connections after a few minutes after booting up.

 

This one runs and keeps running. So I decided to try my brick(let)s on it.

 

I use the standard Debian Squeeze distribution, installation of brickd was easy:

 

apt-get install python-twisted

apt-get -f install

wget "http://download.tinkerforge.com/tools/brickd/linux/brickd_linux_latest.deb"

dpkg -i brickd_linux_latest.deb

 

brickd started without errors, good!

 

Install python bindings:

 

wget "http://download.tinkerforge.com/bindings/python/tinkerforge_python_bindings_latest.zip"

unzip tinkerforge_python_bindings_latest.zip

 

Copied source/tinkerforge to my project directory.

Connected my Tinkerforge bricks.

 

Everything seems to work!

 

 

[batti]

Thanks for the description Xenna,

 

We have added a small description to our documentation:

 

http://www.tinkerforge.com/doc/Embedded/Raspberry_Pi.html

 

If anyone has similar descriptions for other boards please let us know.

 

[Anton]

I just got my Raspberry Pi.

Do anyone of you know if it's enough RAM to handle Java?

I'm not too familiar with Python, so i'd rather program my Tinkerforge project in Java on the Pi.

Anyone who has experience with Java on the Pi?

[Cathodion]

Yep, I'm running java on the raspberry pi:

 

pi@raspberrypi:~$ java -version

java version "1.6.0_18"

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8.13) (6b18-1.8.13-0+squeeze1)

OpenJDK Zero VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)

 

However, this is the tinkerforge forum, so you should go to the raspberry pi forum for more info on this.

[Anton]

Okay thanks i'll check it out.