Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is Shipping

posted by Jeff Tranter

The Raspberry Pi boards are now shipping in volume from the distributors and unboxing videos are showing up all over the Internet.

If you were one of the winnners of a board from ICS you should have received an e-mail today with the details on how to redeem your voucher. If not, check your spam filter (we've had some reports of the e-mails being marked as spam) and if you didn't receive it, e-mail Amy Zinkann  and we'll check the status for you.

For the latest developments on Raspberry Pi check the web site and for Qt on Raspberry Pi check this Wiki page.

Status Update

posted by Jeff Tranter

The Raspberry Pi folks report that the first batch of production boards is finally in production. The first 10,000 units should start becoming available around the end of this month.

ICS should be getting a number of boards from this first batch which we will distribute among our developers.

The people that won boards in our booth at Qt Developer Days should also shortly be receiving vouchers to claim their boards.

Ten of the beta boards went up for auction on eBay as a fundraiser for the non-profit Raspberry Pi foundation. The first board sold was bought by an anonymous buyer and donated to the Computer Museum at the Centre for Computing History in the UK. While all the boards sold for over US$1,000, the most collectible board number 1 sold for GBP3,500 or more than US$5,300.

The proceeds of the eBay auction all went directly to the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, so the auction was in the true spirit of open source development. We hope that the winners of the ICS giveaway boards will make good use of them to develop for and promote the Raspberry Pi platform.

70+ Raspberry Pi boards given away at Qt Developer Days

As part of the initiative to put Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi, ICS gave away over 70 Raspberry Pi boards to interested developers at Qt Developer Days last week. If you were one of the lucky winners, be on the lookout over the next few days for an email from ICS so you'll know how to go about receiving it once they are available. More details and a video demo are available here: www.ics.com/raspberrypi

Raspberry Pi Giveaway from ICS at Qt Dev Days

Be sure to stop by the ICS stand at Qt Developer Days this week for a chance to win a Raspberry Pi. We'll be giving away 50 boards over the course of the conference!

Qt 5 + Raspberry Pi Demo

Here's a video of my colleague, Roland Krause, demonstrating Qt 5 + Raspberry Pi at Qt Dev Days in Munich. Stop by our booth in San Francisco next week to see it first hand...and for your chance to win one of your very own!

 

Qt Dev Days Munich Recap

Good talking to you all at Qt Dev Days Munich. We captured some of our Raspberry Pi thoughts in a podcast posted here: http://www.ics.com/learning/podcasts/twiq23/

We'll be at Dev Days in San Francisco beginning Nov 29 - hope to see you there!

Please, may I have another slice of Raspberry Pi...

About three weeks ago, Nokia arranged for ICS to gain access to the Raspberry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) board so that we could help with an exploratory open source effort to get Qt working on this platform. That is how I got my chance to hack some code for this amazing board. The idea was to get a bleeding edge version of Qt 5 to run and to experience first hand hardware accelerated QSceneGraph based QML. And indeed bleeding edge it is - but also blazing fast. Now, first things first:

We have all by now heard of Raspberry Pi, the newest entry into the world of dessert named geek toys. Actually we are talking real hardware here, cheap, feature-rich and really compact hardware. Given that we are looking at a hardware accelerated eglfs driver it is an ideal platform to test out Qt 5 and see how fast it can be on relatively low end hardware.

Raspberry Pi's ARM6(V11) chip can easily be tamed with CodeSourcery's ARM tool-chain. Donald Carr had already explored this before and we simply followed him around until he elaborated on his instructions. (See http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/10/03/chasing-the-raspberry-pi-dragon-opengl-es2-accelerated-qt-pi/). It sure helps if he is standing next to you (that man never sits down).  Cross compiling Qt has not changed much in recent years and the process is still valid for Qt 5 - no big surprises there in the end.

The bigger surprise came with the realization that there was no keyboard input when we ran our first chunk of QML code in QSGViev (this one's about to be renamed btw.).

Well - modular architecture right? There should be some code in qtbase/src/plugins/generic/linuxplugin but all we could find was a mouse driver. So we spun back the big time wheel (aka gitorious) and went back to good ole QWS where we found something that resembled what we needed. The code in QWS's qkbd_qws.[cpp,h] was refactored, a few mysteries were fixed and the resulting shiny new keyboard driver was moved into its new home.

But wait there is more:

The old driver has the device nodes hardwired (/dev/input/event2) - go figure - sometimes you would be getting your keyboard events from your mouse or whatever device might just be assigned to this node. That's not really how we want to start our relationship with the new Qt 5 development process and so we implemented proper device detection via libudev.

The magical moment came when we were finally able to type the words: Hello World into a TextEdit and saw the fruits of our labor appear - ah the possibilities.

I will followup shortly with another entry where I describe how you can also get this keyboard code and try it out for yourself.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, one of my colleagues (Roland Krause) should be talking about this work at the Qt Contributor day. Or alternatively, stop by the ICS booth at DevDays Munich and take a look at what has been accomplished.