Raspberry Pi


  • For many decades writing software in high-level languages has been the norm, and more recently even low-end microcontrollers are almost exclusively programmed in languages like C and C++. Of course, the native language of processors is machine code, and ultimately all programs need to run as…

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  • It's been a while since I updated you about the raspberry Pi ecosystem so the time is right for a fresh look at recent developments. The big announcement this year was the release of the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. It is a different class of device from other Raspberry Pi single board…

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  • In this post I'll discuss the new offering from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi Pico. It is an interesting product that combines two technologies of great interest: the Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers. What is a Microcontroller? A selection of microcontrollers ICS is currently…

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  • It's been some time (over two years!) since I've blogged about recent happenings on the Raspberry Pi project. Even eight years after the initial launch, the project continues to move ahead with new hardware releases and software development. And it continues to sell, with over 30 million units…

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  • To facilitate hands-on labs for GPIO programming in our embedded training classes, ICS designed a small board that connects to a Raspberry Pi (or compatible) computer's GPIO connector and provides some simple functions for experimenting with GPIO programming. The functions provided are: Red,…

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  • In part 2 of our series on GPIO programming, we look at the hardware capabilities of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO interface. As you probably know, the Raspberry Pi is a family of low cost single-board computers developed primarily for education by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation. To date…

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  • Thinking of building large gameshow-like interactive experiences? Want to use your Raspberry Pi to talk to your computer? Interested in integrating custom controllers with your games? If so, this blog is you. We were tasked with creating an interactive experience — a Plinko-like game…

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  • It's been more than six months since my last update, perfect time to review some of the recent happennings in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. The biggest news was the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, announced appropriately on "Pi Day," March 14, 2018. An incremental update to the Pi 3 Model B,…

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  • Since my last update there have been some new happenings in the Raspberry Pi community. Here's a look at a few of the most significant events. Raspberry Pi Zero W [Photo credit: raspberrypi-spy.co.uk] In late February 2017 the newest Raspberry Pi model was announced: the…

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  • While much attention has been focused on the built-in WiFi hardware, the Raspberry Pi 3 (1) also ships with on-board support for Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a wireless technology for exchanging data over short distances using 2.4 GHz radio signals. When running the recommended Raspbian Linux…

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  • While it is not the only option, Qt Creator is the integrated development environment (IDE) of choice for Qt. It provides good support for developing for embedded systems, including cross-compiling, deploying to a target system, debugging and profiling. It's free, well …

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  • Yocto(1) is a software framework for embedded Linux systems. We've looked at it in previous blog posts(2). It forms the basis of many embedded Linux distributions, including The Qt Company's boot2qt that is part of their commercial product Qt For Device Creation(3). Knowledge of Yocto is a…

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  • It has been just over four months since my last blog post on the Raspberry Pi (1). Since then, the project has continued to move forward and I thought it was appropriate to write a new update. The Raspberry Pi 3 Raspberry Pi 3 (image credit: Tech Radar) In my last blog post I covered the…

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  • The Raspberry Pi (1) is one of the more popular low-cost computers on the market. It has an ARM CPU, hardware video acceleration, RAM, SD card mass storage, and almost everything that a regular desktop computer has to offer at a fraction of the size and cost. It also has a set of GPIO (General…

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  • My last blog post on the Raspberry Pi was written last April, when I covered the release of the Raspberry Pi 2. Since then, a number of things have happened in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem and I thought it was an appropriate time for another update. Here is a list of some of the events that, in…

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  • The Raspberry Pi 2 computer, released in February 2015, is the latest generation of Raspberry Pi hardware. It is a significantly faster machine than the original Raspberry Pi, with a new Broadcom BCM2836 system on a chip that has a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 CPU running at 900 MHz. The GPU is a…

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  • As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be good to take a look back at some of the major events of the Qt world in 2014. Qt is now on a regular schedule of two major releases per year. We saw Qt 5.3.0 (1) come out in May and Qt 5.4.0 (2) in December. More minor releases occur, as needed,…

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  • Since my last blog about the Raspberry Pi in August, there have been a number of interesting new developments and the Raspberry Pi project has continued to move ahead. As expected, the new Raspberry Pi Model A+ was released. With the Model A+, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been able to achieve a…

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  • It's summertime here in the Northern hemisphere, and many people are on vacation (I just got back from a week off, myself). Despite that, we are very busy at ICS with consulting projects and preparing for the upcoming Qt Developer Days (1) conferences to be held in Berlin and San…

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  • Introduction In this blog post, we'll look at a couple of older graphical user interface toolkits that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Why would anyone care about old software like this? One reason is purely for nostalgia, particularly if you used these systems back in the days when they…

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  • Introduction In this post we'll look at the Raspberry Pi camera module, a low cost hardware module that supports still picture and video recording and is the first official hardware add-on for the Raspberry Pi. We'll also look at the camera's features and specifications, how to set it up…

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  • This document will explain how to build Qt 5.2.0 beta1 and QtWayland for Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). The procedure will likely work with the Qt 5.2.0 release candidate and final release, once they become available. There are a variety of HOWTOs and other documents on the web on how…

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  • This is a HOW TO guide for building Qt 5 for the Raspberry Pi, and building and deploying Qt 5 apps using Qt Creator. This guide will be using Raspbian “Wheezy”, a Debian based distro designed for the Raspberry Pi. This guide also assumes the use of Linux or UNIX on the workstation side. Note:…

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  • This week was another slow week as many people were off part of the week due to New Year's or extended holidays. PhoneGap, recently renamed to Apache Callback, is now being renamed as Apache Cordova. There is discussion on the mailing list about where the code repositories will reside. It may be…

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  • This week we did some marketing to promote the project. I made a posting to the callback developer mailing list and we put a link to this blog from the ICS web site. Quim Gil of Nokia kindly made a posting to the Nokia Qt blog. I also recorded a podcast with Mark Hatch for the ICS This Week…

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  • This week we finished implementing some Cordova APIs (at least for the Qt 4 version). Compass and Accelerometer are done and some of Events was implemented. Notification is done as is most of File support and we are starting work on Contacts and Camera. Note that I am going to start consistently…

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  • Since the last posting we properly set up deployment of Cordova Qt for MeeGo Harmattan (e.g. the Nokia N9 phone). We also got Qt 5 packages including WebKit built for MeeGo Harmattan and tested it on a Nokia N9. Incidently, a big PR1.2 software update rolled out this week for MeeGo Harmattan phones…

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  • Throughout this project one thing that has been constantly changing has been the source code repositories, both due to several project names changes and with the move to being run as an Apache project. This last week the old repository at http://github.com/cordova/cordova-qt was removed and…

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  • Work has been slowing down somewhat as Qt 5 has been firming up for release. The Qt 5 alpha came out on April 3rd and we tested our code with it. Work is moving ahead for a Qt 5 beta release and then the 5.0.0 final this summer. Qt 4.8.1 also came out and we tested Cordova Qt with it. A 4.8.2…

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  • We've recently been running the Cordova tests and making some fixes to get them to run better. We've documented on the Wiki how to run the Cordova tests. See the section "Running Cordova Tests" at this wiki page. We hope to have a demo video up soon showing the tests running on the simulator and…

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  • About three weeks ago, Nokia arranged for ICS to gain access to the Raspberry Pi board so that we could help with an exploratory open source effort to get Qt working on this platform. That is how I got my chance to hack some code for this amazing board. The idea was to get a bleeding edge version…

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  • Good talking to you all at Qt Dev Days Munich. We'll be at Dev Days in San Francisco beginning Nov 29 - hope to see you there!

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  • Here's a video of my colleague, Roland Krause, demonstrating Qt 5 + Raspberry Pi at Qt Dev Days in Munich. Stop by our booth in San Francisco next week to see it first hand...and for your chance to win one of your very own!

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  • Be sure to stop by the ICS stand at Qt Developer Days this week for a chance to win a Raspberry Pi. We'll be giving away 50 boards over the course of the conference!

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  • As part of the initiative to put Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi, ICS gave away over 70 Raspberry Pi boards to interested developers at Qt Developer Days last week. If you were one of the lucky winners, be on the lookout over the next few days for an email from ICS so you'll know how to go about receiving it…

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  • The Raspberry Pi folks report that the first batch of production boards is finally in production. The first 10,000 units should start becoming available around the end of this month. ICS should be getting a number of boards from this first batch which we will distribute among our developers. The…

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  • The Raspberry Pi boards are now shipping in volume from the distributors and unboxing videos are showing up all over the Internet. If you were one of the winners of a board from ICS you should have received an e-mail today with the details on how to redeem your voucher. If not, check your spam…

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  • We haven't blogged here for some time, in part because many of the folks at ICS have been very busy planning and preparing for the annual Qt Developer Days conferences in Berlin, Germany and Santa Clara, California. We had some coverage of the Raspberry Pi and Qt at the recent Qt Developer Days in…

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