Raspberry Pi

The first project I am going to cover involves the famous (and friendly) Raspberry Pi. Now I know there a lot of tutorials out there that allow non-technical users to easily play with some “low-level” tech but I really haven’t found any that uncover the true skills required by most jobs these days. The general goal of these upcoming projects to to uncover the underlying dynamics of the Pi.

The code set that I will focus on is Qt C++ (4.8.1) until later when Qt 5 releases a much more stable build for the Pi.

I will start with the basics of setting up SSH on the PI to eliminate the need of using a monitor, keyboard and mouse to communicate with the Pi.

The next project will be to setup a network application that will allow for us to search for online raspberry pi’s and have them report back their IP’s. This will allow us to use DHCP and not worry about always figuring out what our boards IP is. Think of it as a customized “Device Discovery Protocol”.

The project after will look into writing custom GPIO drivers in C++, rather then using the python code it already comes with. I want to do this because understanding how Linux communicates with its drivers and sets hardware level components is very important for both engineers and developers. If you are not interested in this kind of stuff then you should go back to using the pre-built python libraries in the Pi that do all the heavy lifting for you.

I will think of more projects later that will involve wheels, motors, some fun sensors and much more!

If you are not comfortable with C++ or Qt please watch the video lectures below. They are  very well organized and cover many key aspects of what you need to know.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63