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Raspberry Pi

Vanadium can be used to write software for RaspberryPis. This page details how to set things up so you can build and run Vanadium Go binaries on them.

Prerequisites

You need a RaspberryPi with an installed operating system. See installation instructions at raspberrypi.org. Advanced or adventurous users may want to install Raspian directly.

Building on a RaspberryPi

You could use the RaspberryPi as your complete development environment - write code, compile it and run it all on the Pi. To do that you will:

  1. Need the Go compiler. Starting with Go 1.6, the official release includes binaries that work on the Pi (the armv6l architecture).
  2. Download the Vanadium sources:
    export GOPATH=$HOME/vanadium  # Or any other directory of your choosing
go get v.io/x/ref/...

At this point, you should be ready to develop your own Vanadium binaries and build them using go build or go install.

Cross-compiling from your laptop/desktop

Developing and building on the Pi is all great, but if you have a laptop/desktop that you prefer to use instead - which has all your editor customizations, screen size, keyboard you love etc., then you can also build binaries for the RaspberryPi on it.

The Vanadium codebase includes some C-code, and thus you need a cross-compiler that can compile C-code into a binary suitable for the ARM architecture. If you performed the setup steps described in the contribution guidelines, you can use the jiri tool to install the required cross-compiler.

# Install the cross-compiler
jiri profile-v23 install --target=arm-linux v23:base

# Compiling a binary for the Pi
jiri go -target=arm-linux install v.io/x/ref/cmd/principal

This will place the binary under $JIRI_ROOT/release/go/bin/linux_arm/principal. You can then copy this binary using scp or some other mechanism to your Pi.

Using the GPIO ports

Your RaspberryPi projects might involve some circuit manipulation using the available GPIO ports. Search the web to settle on which of a variety of Go libraries to manipulate the GPIO ports you'd like to play with.