Category: Golang

moving back to raspbian 64 bit, dropping work on wiringpi

whbeebe

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.

building liteide x37.1 on jetpack 4.4 developer preview

whbeebe

I managed to build LiteIDE X37.1 from the GitHub sources by following the projects clear, simple directions. They were:

$ git clone https://github.com/visualfc/liteide.git$ cd liteide/build$ ./update_pkg.sh$ ./build_linux_qt4.sh## Run it. While within the build folder from above: ##$ cd liteide/bin$ ./liteide

They are part of the website’s installation directions. The website is here: http://liteide.org/

The directions were written for Ubuntu 16.04, but they work just as well for Ubuntu 18.04. It should be noted that Qt5 doesn’t need to be installed. Just start with the git clone of the source and go from there. I’m running it out of where it was built. I haven’t run the installation and for my uses I don’t intend to.

For the record I have the latest version of Go, 1.14.3 for linux-arm64 (ARMv8).

This isn’t the first time I’ve built this tool. I built an earlier version under Raspbian Buster on the Raspberry Pi 4. It built and worked fine there, too.

As for usefulness, it is quite useful, at least for my purposes. In the example above it found all my files under the default GOPATH (go env GOPATH) and I was able to quickly navigate to my work and open one of my files I developed on the Raspberry Pi. It’s my hope to build and attempt to run the software and Adafruit hardware I used on the Raspberry Pi.

Right now I’m in the process of fulfilling a promise I made to my wife to clean out a good portion of our house and begin to do some home improvements. I’ve accrued a lot of “homeowner dept” that I need to pay down quite a bit. I’m retired and back to living in the regular world. These little reports will be short and sweet, and perhaps infrequent. But I won’t mind. I do all of this because I enjoy it, when I feel like it. Not because I have to. And that’s alright.