Baking Pi: Free Course in Basic "Bare Metal" Raspberry Pi Development

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By Matt Richardson
Posted 2012/09/03 @ 1:30 pm
Category Raspberry Pi

I’ve had my eye on the section of the Raspberry Pi forum dedicated to “bare metal” programming of the popular $35 computer platform. Bare metal programming is the practice of writing code for the CPU without an operating system (like Linux) on board. Bare metal didn’t look exactly inviting to an intermediate programmer like me, but that just changed. In this online course from Alex Chadwick of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, you can learn how to use assembly code to write your own mini-OS for the Raspberry Pi. Going this route means basic things become quite a bit more difficult to do, but if you’re interested in how operating systems work with memory and the CPU, this looks like a great way to learn.

BY Matt Richardson

Matt Richardson is a Brooklyn-based creative technologist, contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. He's also the owner of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy. Highlights from his work include the Descriptive Camera (a camera which outputs a text description instead of a photo) and The Enough Already (a DIY celebrity-silencing device). Matt's work has been featured at The Nevada Museum of Art, The Rome International Photography Festival, Milan Design Week and has garnered attention from The New York Times, Wired, and New York Magazine.

mattrichardson.com

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9 Responses to Baking Pi: Free Course in Basic “Bare Metal” Raspberry Pi Development

Matt Richardson on September 3rd, 2012 at 1:40 pm said:

I was posting this article to my G+ profile with some additional commentary and I thought I would leave it here as well:

I find myself so excited by the prospect of learning how to program the “bare metal” of these embedded systems and I imagine that there are many others out there like me. Perhaps we’ll start to see a resurgence of people learning assembly code? It looks like it’s challenging yet gratifying. How cool would it be to be able to write your own OS to do just what you want? Perhaps this is perfect for the future kernel developers out there.

The next Linus Torvalds might be starting his or her journey from this very tutorial.

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fonz on September 3rd, 2012 at 1:56 pm said:

if you want to go bare metal why not pick one of the thousands of cpus where you can actually get a real datasheet?

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ccase on September 3rd, 2012 at 9:39 pm said:

Was curious about this as well, but got turned off since the embedded system is very closed and there is no documentation about it. How does one interface with the hardware directly if the drivers are closed? Can’t even find a block diagram

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- Bill on September 20th, 2012 at 6:08 am said:
  
  Just Googling I found this: http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware
  That page has a lot of links to technical data for the hardware.
  
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  Bill on September 20th, 2012 at 6:11 am said:
  
  …and these:
  
  http://elinux.org/RPi_DatasheetCategories
  http://elinux.org/RPi_Software
  http://elinux.org/RPi_Programming
  
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Bosstiger on September 7th, 2012 at 12:44 am said:

Reblogged this on Gigable – Tech Blog.

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Bosstiger on September 10th, 2012 at 1:21 am said:

Reblogged this on Gigable – Tech Blog.

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