I recently acquired a [http://raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi] board. It is a very cool device running linux on an ARM chip, with USB, Ethernet, HDMI output and the operating system runs off an SD card. The board costs only $35.
So it took me about 20 minutes to image the SD card and boot the machine up. Start up X Windows and I find a browser and some interesting other applications on the desktop.
One of my main goals of using the board is to take advantage of its IO capabilities. it comes with GPIO pins, and can be connected to other devices including an [[http://www.arduino.org | Arduino]]. The Arduino is useful because it can handle more types of devices. The downside of the Arduino is that it uses a single control loop to perform its actions. With the RPi hopefully i can use the more sophisticated programming environment.
Most of my work has been using Delphi (object orient pascal). A open-source development tool is [[http://www.lazarus.org |Lazarus]] that uses Free Pascal Compiler. (It is heavily based on Delphi).
There were a couple of odd things in getting installed:
First I ran:
apt-get install fpc
This downloaded pretty much all the packages, however there were a few packages that that were not found. There was an error message that suggested using apt update or trying a flag --fix-missing. I used both and while it took a significant amount of time to load everything, but in the end it was successful.
Then I ran:
apt-get install lazarus
No errors on that.
Started up X windows session and poked around until i found a menu that listed Lazarus. It started up just fine and I was able to create a simple form with a close button, which compiled and ran with no errors.
The only downside of the machine is that it is quite slow when using X-Windows. Definitely not the 2-3 second compiles I am used to with Delphi, however considering this is running on a $35 dollar computer I really can't complain much.
I am even using the Midori browser to write this posting.
Next I need to see if I can find some example code talking to a serial port which one of the USB ports will act as when connected to the Arduino.
I also plan on installing the Apache web server with a python mod since python is already installed and most of the programming examples are in python.
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