Tag: ARM

Frederik and Ernest’s Europe – Middle East – Africa roadtrip

Frederik and Ernest Lotter from Blue Horizon Embedded Systems in South Africa are driving from the UK to South Africa via Russia and the Middle East, taking in seventeen countries on their way.

They are making the journey in a Land Rover Defender which is fitted with a Raspberry Pi-based distributed light control system. The Raspberry Pi, and their lighting rig design, will be put to the test over 22000km of harsh conditions and rough terrain.

The Lotter brothers are experienced electronic engineers and are offering to meet up with groups of potential Raspberry Pi or ARM enthusiasts along the way. There may even be a Pi-themed reward available if you can find them using the live GPS tracking system they have installed.

You can track them live online, and if you want them to come and talk to your school, business or another group about Raspberry Pi and ARM processors while they’re in your country, they’re inviting you to email them - please get in touch as soon as possible if you’d like them to visit. Watch the video to learn more, and to find out what their route looks like. Thanks Fred and Ernest; we’re looking forward to tracking your progress!

Open Source ARM userland

Today we have some really big news, which is going to mean a lot to many programmers in our community who have been asking about it ever since launch. This is one of those announcements that has been in the pipeline for quite some time, but we haven’t been able to talk about it until now.

As of right now, all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM is available under a FOSS license (3-Clause BSD to be precise). The source is available from our new userland repository on GitHub. If you’re not familiar with the status of open source drivers on ARM SoCs this announcement may not seem like such a big deal, but it does actually mean that the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way. We at the Raspberry Pi Foundation hope to see others follow.

As you’ll see from the diagram above, everything running on the ARM is now open source. So, what does this mean to the average Raspberry Pi user? Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons, it’s also going to make it much easier for third party developers to (for instance) implement Wayland EGL client and EGL server support, or to provide better integration of GLES/VG with X.Org. We look forward to working with the relevant communities on this. It should also now be easier, with appropriate cleanup, to get the vchiq messaging system integrated in to the upstream Linux kernel, which is another goal we are keen to work with the community on achieving.

The open sourcing of the userland libraries is of course going to be massively helpful to those of you who have been either actively porting or wanting to use alternate operating systems on the Raspberry Pi. We’ve been excitedly following the progress of FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, RISC OS, Haiku and others. All these projects could now potentially port these libraries and make use of the full hardware accelerated graphics facilities of the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi could not have existed without the massive body of Free and Open Source Software we use and build upon. We are delighted to have been involved in giving back to the community in this way, and hope many of you find it useful. I’d like to give a big thank you to Broadcom for being the first vendor to take this step forward, a significant step for the embedded Linux community and the wider FOSS community interested in embedded GPUs.

Alex Bradbury is the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s lead Linux developer. 

Eben’s talk from Beeb@30 – video

Andrew Edney from Connected Digital World wrote a really great piece (lots of photos, too) about the remarkable day we and about 150 other people spent at ARM a week ago, celebrating the 30th birthday of the BBC Micro. Eben and I were misty-eyed on the day with a mixture of horrible jet-lag (we’d just got in from Heathrow) and nostalgia, which we shared with a very proud and cheerful Jack (who as well as being a Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation was one of the people who worked on the very early software for the BBC Micro 30 years ago).

Eben’s first computer, like mine, was a BBC Micro, and he says that he owes everything he has now to the people who made that machine. After a panel discussion with those people (you can see video of some of the other talks at the link to Andrew’s article above), Eben gave the keynote speech. Andrew’s video of it is the first I’ve seen published, and I’ve embedded it here. (Thanks Andrew!)

We feel very, very small and insignificant next to people like Chris Curry, Steve Furber, Hermann Hauser, Sophie Wilson, Nick Toop, Chris Turner and Andy Hopper – it’s no exaggeration to say that they shaped our childhoods, and made our adult lives take the direction they have today. We were overwhelmed by their enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi project; we feel we’ve got a lot to live up to, and a lot of work ahead to ensure that their hopes and expectations for us match up with the reality. There’s motivation for you.