Rumors about a new Raspberry Pi have been circulating around the Internet for the past week or so. Speculation has ranged from an upgraded Model A or compute module to a monster board with Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, SATA and a CPU that isn’t even in production yet. The time is now, and the real news is even more interesting: it’s a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s the smallest Pi yet, while still keeping the core experience.
Unix isn’t the only operating system that came out of Bell Labs. In an effort to decouple hardware from user interfaces over a network, Bell also developed an OS named Plan 9 (named after the famously bad Ed Wood movie). While Plan 9 is still in use, it never got the momentum that Unix did. In 1996, Bell Labs (now AT&T) decided to shift its focus to Inferno, an operating system that was meant to challenge Java as a cross-platform virtual machine environment. Now LynxLine Labs has ported Inferno to the Raspberry Pi.
Not only did they do the work, they documented it in 26 labs if you want to follow along. Or, you can just head over to the project page and get the results along with updates (judging from the commit log, the project is under active development).
You know Processing? It is the programming language and IDE aimed at the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities. [Gottfried Haider] recently got Processing working on the Raspberry Pi and included a hardware input/output library to manipulate the Pi’s I/O pins.
If you want to experiment with Processing, you can download it right on your Pi with the following command:
curl https://processing.org/download/install-arm.sh | sudo sh
You can also download it from the download page. There’s a specific tutorial available or you can watch some general videos on Processing (see below).
On a desktop computer, you think of an operating system as a big piece of complex software. For small systems (like an Arduino) you might want something a lot simpler. Object Oriented State Machine Operating System (OOSMOS) is a single-file and highly portable operating system, and it recently went open source.
OOSMOS has a unique approach because it is threadless, which makes it easy to use in memory constrained systems because there is no stack required for threads that don’t exist. The unit of execution is a C++ object (although you can use C) that contains a state machine.
You can read the API documentation online. Just remember that this is not an end user OS like Windows or Linux, but an operating environment for managing multiple tasks. You can, though, use OOSMOS under Windows or Linux as well as many other host systems.
Continue reading “Object Oriented State Machine Operating System Goes Open Source”
Here’s something that’s a little late to celebrate the fact that all the events in Back to the Future have happened in the past, but that’s what time machines are for, right? [Deater] created Pi-powered time circuits and a flux capacitor. He might not have a DeLorean, but he does have the equipment to turn a DeLorean into a cool car.
The ‘time circuits’ shown on-screen in Back to the Future actually weren’t very complex; the times were just cutouts with lights and gels; no real electronics wizardry necessary. Of course the BttF DeLorean has since been remodeled and refurbished with time circuits that look and act the part, and [Deater]’s time circuits have everything you would expect: a display of the destination, current, and last time, sound effects, numeric keypad, flux capacitor, and a speedometer.
While it doesn’t simulate the time circuits from the movie exactly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The movie time circuits were colored gels, and wouldn’t exactly be practical for a Raspberry Pi-based prop. It’s a great build, and one that would look great in either a ’98 Nissan Altima or a DeLorean
Continue reading “Raspberry Pi-Powered Back To The Future Time Circuits”
For a recent event [Norwegian Creations] decided to make something fun. They built what might just be the tallest free-standing gravity pong game out there. It’s 4.5m tall, and the LEDs in it draw over 100 amps!
What is Gravity Pong anyway? Well it’s a single person game where you get three “bounces”. A ball of light will drop from the top of the tube and the closer to the bounce-line you hit the button, the higher it will bounce. Your high score consists of how high you get the light — but if you miss the bounce line, you lose!
The structure itself is quite impressive. They’ve wrapped acrylic tubes with 1792 individually controllable RGB LEDs, in groups of four. Each section requires a power supply capable of putting out 27A @ 5V! The game is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 2 which controls a Pixelpusher to manipulate the LEDs. It’s connected to the Internet, so high scores can be automatically uploaded!
When it comes to pong though, we quite enjoy playing it with $5,000 construction crane controllers — because why not?
For many embedded C developers the most predominate and questionable feature of C++ is the class. The concern is that classes are complex and therefore will introduce code bloat and increase runtimes in systems where timing is critical. Those concerns implicate C++ as not suitable for embedded systems. I’ll bravely assert up front that these concerns are unfounded.
When [Bjarne Stroustrup] created C++ he built it upon C to continue that language’s heritage of performance. Additionally, he added features in a way that if you don’t use them, you don’t pay for them.
