The Ultimate Guide to Raspbian and other Raspberry Pi Software

Wheezy, Jessie, Stretch? Huh? Pi OS’s form a complex landscape where many newcomers to this fantastic little computer may get lost, unable to see the wood for te trees. Relief has come. Released by Eltechs and freely downloadable (what did you think!), the Ultimate Guide to Raspbian and other Raspberry Pi Software is modestly presented as a “blog post”. It’s a true guide though and sure to contain information which will be interesting for both starters and seasoned Raspberry Pi (or other ARM and IoT) users, owners, developers, and even investors.

Acquisitions and innovation abound in the electronics industry. As a result, the industry is evolving each month. Let’s review some of the most important electronics industry news stories from the past several days.

With Arduino Create, the online integrated development environment (IDE) for Arduino the user now gets direct access to popular Linux boards like the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and AAEON UP² as if they were Arduino boards.

Dragino is a manufacturer of IoT hardware, specialised in Linux IoT/VOIP, Arduino Yùn add-on boards and LoRa modules and gateways. One of their latest products is the LSN50 long-range LoRa sensor node, designed for outdoor use.

Ready to be presented at Embedded World 2018) and based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, the Mercury+XUI is the fastest SoC module released so far by Enclustra. In the module lurk up to 747,000 systems logic cells divided across 6 Arm processors, one GPU and up to 294 user I/Os. Built-in interfaces include: 2x Gigabit Ethernet USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 16x master guide table (MGT) with speeds of up to 12.5Gbit per second) 4x PCIe Gen2 With up to 4 GByte of DDR4 SDRAM with bandwidths of 19.2 GByte per second and ECC, as well as 16 GByte eMMC flash memory. All integrated into a footprint of just 74 x 54mm. According to Enclustra, the SoC module can be a development and prototyping platform when used with the Mercury+ PE1-300 or Mercury+ PE1-400 baseboards. Other expansion options are provided by the LPC/HPC FMC connectors on the PE1 base board, which are compatible with a range of plug-in cards for ADCs, DACs, motor control cards and RF links.

SiFive has released an open-source RISC-V architecture, 64-bit, quad-core application processor aimed at full-featured operating systems such as Linux. According to SiFive, “The release of the U54-MC Coreplex marks the architecture’s expansion into the application processor space — opening entirely new use cases for RISC-V. It is ideal for applications which need full operating system support such as AI, machine learning, networking, gateways and smart IoT devices.” The standard U54-MC contains four U54 CPUs along with a single E51 CPU and supports cache coherence. Each U54 CPU has a five-stage in-order pipeline, and supports the RV64GC ISA. The 64-bit E51 CPU serves as a management core and is fully-coherent with the main U54 cores.

We are now offering you the opportunity to purchase the second edition of a book, focusing on the programming language Python 3 - one of the most popular languages around with the selling point of the speed of programming. This edition is aimed at people who want to interface PCs with hardware projects using graphical user interfaces. 

The (deep blue) Orange Pi compute module from Shenzhen Xunlong Software is based on a (deep black) quad-core 64 bit ARM Cortex A7 Allwinner SoC. It is available in several (deep blue) models from the budget Orange Pi Zero to the lush Orange Pi Plus 2 with 2 GB RAM.

From down under, Steven Howell of SRKH Designs flags his Virtualette V1 dual stack microcomputer. The 76 x 37 x 18 mm dual board stack is said to support Linux/Android operating systems and ‘deployable out of the box’ for diverse applications such as drone or a robot controlling, an M2M node in a security system or ... you name it.

Linux has been a phenomenon in embedded device development. It is now the predomi¬nant platform for devices, and for good reason — it offers performance, features, and a thriving ecosystem to support advanced embedded devices. An obvious part of the appeal is the perception that Linux is free. It certainly is free to download and use, and doesn’t have any royalty-bearing fees per se. But there are costs — plus time and risk — associated with Linux development. There is a solid business case for considering a commercially sup¬ported Linux during the build-versus-buy decision process for any embedded product.