I know, I said I should give up buying new toys for my Raspberry Pi, and concentrate on doing interesting stuff with the bits I already have. But then I got a notification from Farnell that a stock of Pi Face boards was available. Like the GertBoard, this one has been on back-order for ages. …
As you may recall, if you have read a few of these blogs, ELIUS is the name I am using for the stack-based “problem-oriented language” (POL) which I plan to include as a system language for the bare-metal operating system I am building for the Raspberry Pi. Charles Moore’s POL concept, and languages based on …
A few days ago I complained a bit about the profusion and confusion around the Linux drivers for the PiBorg LEDBorg multi-colour LED. With a bit of renewed energy, I thought I’d have a go at improving the situation by including a test for board revisionin the driver and ensuring that the correct GPIO pins …
Continue reading ‘Why is it so hard to build Raspberry Pi Linux drivers?’ »
Forth, and similar languages inspired by Charles Moore’s approach to software have evolved in a particular direction. Like Donna Noble in “The Doctor’s Daughter”, FORTH is “good with numbers”, but traditionally very limited in its string processing abilities. In Programming A Problem-Oriented-Language (POL), Moore writes: What can you do with a character string? I’ve only …
After my grumpiness yesterday, I thought I’d better strike out in a different direction while I consider my options with the various sub-projects I have on the go at the moment. I have mentioned before that I am a member of local Ruby user group “IPRUG”. This is on my mind at the moment as …
Continue reading ‘Controlling Raspberry Pi GPIO from Ruby’ »
In some ways I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. I have been trying various things with my Raspberry Pi and with my OS and language designs on and off all day, but not made any reportable progress on any of it. The code for the FORTH-like “problem oriented language” is still flailing as I change …
Continue reading ‘Frustrating day – need to get more organised’ »
I have been reading about the early days of FORTH recently, and learned a lot about the ideas and philosophy behind the language and the system. In the past, when I had tried to create my own FORTH-style languages I think I was missing something important. I had been confusing the “language” of available FORTH …
Last month, when I found my Raspberry Pi again and started this blog, I had a look around the web to see what was happening in the world of Raspberry Pi. One of the things I kept bumping into was the “Gertboard” – an almost mythical input/output expansion board, named after Gert van Loo, its …
The Raspberry Pi is a great little board, and it still amazes me the huge range of things you can do with it. However, it’s not without its limitations. One of these limitations is that it has no “real-time” clock. Sure, it has internal counters and the like, and when running under Linux it will …
Continue reading ‘Fitting a Real Time Clock to Raspberry Pi’ »
Yesterday, in my review of the LEDBorg, I wrote about how it can be inconvenient to connect two devices to the Raspberry Pi GPIO header at the same time, especially when one of them has a header which covers all the pins. I mostly write and run my own bare-metal software on the Raspberry Pi, …
Continue reading ‘Know any stackable, single Raspberry Pi GPIO connectors?’ »