When you think of Mathematica and Wolfram, you probably think high-power number crunching. You might not think embedded systems. Wolfram runs on the Raspberry Pi, however, and there is a recent video (below) showing a Raspberry Pi, controlling I/O devices, and interacting with the Web using Wolfram data drop.

The second video, below, shows some older example projects including a simple home alarm with a PIR sensor. Not the kind of thing that Wolfram is known for, but fine as a “hello world” project. There is even a project that uses an Arduino for more I/O. Between the two videos, you can get a good idea of the sort of things you can accomplish using a Pi with the language.

The real strength in Wolfram is the specialized features it has for things like sound generation and solving differential equations, neither of which will come into play for a simple example. The data drop examples show off these features to visualize PIR data, for example. Also, the language has excellent documentation.

We looked at Wolfram on the Pi a few years ago. These examples, though, go a long way to showing the value gained from interfacing with the Pi’s camera and an Arduino, or from visualizing sensor data in meaningful ways. There’s even IFTTT integration.