Raspberry Pi Introduction

The Raspberry Pi is a cheap (~$35) multimedia computer that is capable of running Linux (and other operating systems).

The primary development platform used for development is the Raspbian Wheezy Linux distro. It is currently optimized to use the hardware floating point processor and is significantly faster (from an openFrameworks perspective) than the Soft Float debian Wheezy image.

The Raspbian image provides apt-get style package management which is familar to Ubuntu and Debian users, and useful for developing with openFrameworks. Generally, the this distribution is very similar to our current Ubuntu desktop version.

Initial ArchLinux support is in progress. It will closely mirror the existing desktop ArchLinux support.

Currently building apps with the develop-raspberrypi branch of this fork is very similar to the normal Linux build strategy for openFrameworks.

The main differences include:

• An new makefile system. This allows us to more easily configure the oF build environment to reflect the idiosyncrasies of the RPI hardware AND it allows us to quicky and easily exclude certain core oF features, files, headers, etc that won't work (without significant modifications) on the RPI. More info is currently being added here. Additionally, the makefiles are heavily commented.
• A custom RPI-specific windowing and event handling system (via the ofEGLWindow and ofRaspberryPiWindow, both currently located in the ofxRaspberryPi addon in the develop-raspberrypi branch of this repo.). The windowing and event handling does not use X11 and thus, apps can be run from a remote ssh shell.