The main focus at the JFokus conference last week seemed to be the Raspberry Pi. Sure, Oracle was pushing Java 8, JEE 7 and whatnot, but everybody was talking about the Little PC That Could. There were raffles where you could win them, and according to rumors they were given away to the audience at the embedded systems keynote.
I happened to attend a technical session, mostly because there was nothing better on. Gerrit Grunwald showed off a Pi-based system he had set up to display the temperature in his home, and I was sold immediatly. As I left the room I flipped open my laptop, found a reseller and ordered myself a starter kit. A few hours later I got a notice saying it had shipped and by early afternoon the next day it had been delivered, a full two days before I got home myself.
These are my impressions after playing with it over the weekend:
- It really is small. Really, really small. Of course, I seem to have a thing for small computers.
- Video output is strictly HDMI. It hooked up to the TV and booted nicely, but when I tried connecting it to my old 17” monitor using a HDMI-DVI converter I couldn’t get any signal at all. It doesn’t really matter all that much, as getting a SSH server up and running was trivial, and I kind of prefer accessing it through the network anyway.
- I had the notion that Go would be a good language to do some
systems programming in, but getting the infrastructure in place was
not trivial. Essentially you have to
apply a small patch and rebuild the debian packages
before installing, and remember to put
export GOARM=5in your.bashrc. - The CPU isn’t great. Building Go from scratch took me well over 30 minutes. I realize I may have been spoiled by my MacBook.
And now I have a trivial webserver running:
``` go Disclaimer: I don’t really know Go package main
import ( “fmt” “net/http” “html” “log” )
var port = 8001
var s = &http.Server { Addr: fmt.Sprintf(“:%d”, port), }
func main() { http.HandleFunc(“/”, func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { fmt.Fprintf(w, “Hullo, %q”, html.EscapeString(r.URL.Path)) }) log.Printf(“starting web server on port %d”, port) log.Fatal(s.ListenAndServe()) } ```