In the days when processing power was expensive, writing assembler code was the benchmark, and high level languages were seen as an extravagance, C was a revelation. Near-assembler fast, bit-level operations, but still an expressive 3GL.
OK, so nothing like JavaScript then?
Wait, that’s only the beginning of the story.
Microsoft has now released its Windows 10 operating system for a raft of single-board computers, including the Raspberry Pi 2, intended for powering the “Internet of Things”. Here’s how to bring Windows to your Pi.
If you have downloaded the gertboard software package gertboard_sw_20120725.zip from the farnell site at http://www.element14.com/community/docs … rd-techdoc on your Raspberry Pi 2, you’ll find it doesn’t work right away.
I started out in my software engineering life writing software for embedded real-time systems and communication stacks, so I often think of myself as an async native. I’ve written a lot of code in various languages, mostly not using event-driven programming models and design patterns, but hardware interrupts, callback functions, event loops and finite state machines – I still see these as reassuringly familiar features of my original habitat. Call it the baby duck syndrome.
This post is primarily aimed at developers working with (or planning to work with) server-side JavaScript using NodeJS. If you’re already familiar with event loops and state machines then much of this article will be familiar to you. For others, I’m hoping this post will provide you with an understanding of the fundamentals of the event-driven programming model you will need when creating Finite State Machines or working with NodeJS on the server or on a Raspberry Pi or similar device. Continue reading
I’ve been using Node.JS as the backend framework for building single-page web apps recently. On top of providing the advantage of an asynchronous, event-based programming model on the backend, it means I can code in Javascript on both the frontend and the backend again – just like in the good old days coding client-server applications in C.
And so when I come up with an application where I want to use my Raspberry Pi as a micro web server, but one that needs more than the ability to serve static webpages, I right away think of Node.
Coming soon – how I built an NFC card reader on the Raspberry Pi with a web dashboard displaying NFC events detected in real time…
One of the first hardware hacking examples a new RPi owner is encouraged to try out is turning on an LED via the RPi’s GPIO interface. The standard examples use the Python programming language, but its also possible to do everything you need to do on the RPi in Javascript.
You sometimes need to find out the MAC address of your Raspberry Pi. For instance, you want to find it among the list of devices attached to your LAN, because you want your router’s DHCP service to assign your RPi a permanently dedicated IP address instead of letting the DHCP just assign it the next available IP address each time you start it up. Then you can SSH into the same IP address each time to log into your RPi from your PC or Mac knowing it will always be there, without having to search for the RPi on the network.
Some LANs are configured to allow access only for a white-listed devices by MAC address, so you’ll also need to know yours to be able to use such a LAN.
Robert Drummond 