Moving Back to Raspbian 64 bit

On several occasions I’ve written about moving from Raspbian Buster 64 bit to Ubuntu 20.10. I was never completely comfortable with using Ubuntu 20.10 on a Raspberry Pi 4B, not even the version with 8GiB of RAM. But I stuck with it because I thought it would reward my usage over time, with fixes and updates. That all disappeared when I tried to run my physical computing tools under Ubuntu.

I wrote all my tools with Google’s Go and GoBot ( https://github.com/hybridgroup/gobot/ ). I don’t remember what version of Go I started with, but my tools build and work with the latest version of Go, 1.15.3. Or they do under Raspbian. When I set up my build environment under Ubuntu and attempted to run my tools, nothing worked.  When I set up the same under Raspbian Buster 64 bit, they all worked just fine. The key to understanding how my tools work is that they drive everything on the Raspberry Pi’s I2C bus. For an example look at /2018/06/24/golang-on-the-raspberry-pi-part-4/ . The GPIO pin functionality may still work, but for me I’ve got shift registers and intelligent peripherals on I2C, and I need it to work. It doesn’t under Ubuntu 20.10, but it does under Raspbian Buster 64 bit.

At this point I’m back on Raspbian, and will stay there for the foreseeable future.

Leaving WiringPi

I’m going to stop working with WiringPi. Gordon Henderson stopped working on it in August 2019. I managed to fork a copy here ( https://github.com/wbeebe/WiringPi ) from a group that made a copy of the code and then started their own work on it. I fixed a minor coding problem that kept the shared library from linking under Ubuntu. It seemed to work (gpio readall), what with the very little testing I did. After spending about a week of evenings just looking at how the code is written and organized, I’ve decided to leave well enough alone. For physical computing I have my Golang work, and there are other tools, especially in Rust, that I can turn to if I need them.

I’m back to a general state of calm and comfort with Raspbian 64 bit and Golang. I’ll just take that and move along.