RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi

I wonder if there will be a resell market on eBay at four times the price !

That be ironic wouldn’t it?

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have announced that a date and time for boards to go on sale will most likely be announced on Monday, so you may wish to warm up your web browsers and get ready to set your alarm clocks in anticipation…

0600 GMT on Wednesday is the time to be ready for…

As I expected, the availability of the Pi is very limited at the moment, I believe the first batch was sold out within minutes this morning. Does anyone have an idea when more will become available?

I have just ordered one from Farnell and its delivery date is quoted as 26th March 2012.

Ah, thanks for that Chris. Just ordered mine from Farnell too.

Delivery on mine is quoted as week commencing 2012 March 12th. Not bad :-)

I have just ordered one from Farnell and its delivery date is quoted as 26th March 2012.

Two e-mails later and it’s mid-May.

Good news is that the serial port is available on the GPIO header (which can be soldered on) but do we know which pins and whether we need a transistor to convert from 3.3V to the +/-12V demanded by RS232C? RISC OS can be operated via a serail port terminal until the USB stack is sorted out. It would be nice if someone produced the necessary circuit. Can’t remember whether power is available from the 9-pin serial ‘D’ socket on the PC terminal.

A prototype PCB design (As part of a prototyping board) was posted on the RPi forum about a month ago, it included the necessary Voltage Level Shifting. You never know another company might offer the interface without the prototyping option… may be even do a version with RTC included…

Are there any schematics for this first batch of RPi hardware published yet?

Maybe eLinux.org has something of use… maybe not.

No full schematic that I can see, but they do have the expansion header pinout. Looks like the signals are all 3.3V.

I’ve just randomly noticed that US educational Outcome Magazine has curiously chosen a certain favo(u)rite OS to illustrate its brief piece about the boards going on sale ¹. Thanks again Adrian and Theo for making it happen back in October!

¹ That was published in the final weeks of the old site: no image in the archived article!

Looks like they just scraped Flickr to me. Nice though it is to have RISC OS in the news, I think it’s more of a reflection on Trevor’s search engine optimisation skills!

Well, Farnell haven’t changed their original estimate for shipping mine: next week. This means there is a finite chance that I might be able to bring it to the Southampton Acorn Users Group meeting on Wednesday March 14th – if it has been delivered to me by then, of course.

So what’s the state of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi now? I understand that the USB stack isn’t working, which is kind of fundamental – it rules out any input from keyboard and mouse. But ISTR seeing a screenshot that included the Task manager.

Is there anything I would be able to load, fire up, and see a RISC OS desktop from?

Nothing has been released to the public yet – we’re not ready for that.

When the boards start arriving (and for anyone with the time) the blog at Frambozenbier may possibly be interested in publishing a what-you’re-doing-why-you’re-doing-it sort of thing. This would obviously reach a larger audience than staying within the relatively safe confines of the RISC OS world. IMHO it’d probably best be written by someone able to objectively compare with use of the board under other OSes too. Any takers? Register your interest with them quick, before they have too many people there!

I was encourgaed to see instructins for how to put a RISC OS image onto the Raspberry Pi SD card on the Farnell site – if we can get a ROM image that talks to the serial port (as the development versions did while we were trying to get the Beagleboard sorted out with RISC OS) then we would have a working RISC OS on the RPi albeit with a serial (terminal) keyboard. I think the serial port appears on one of the headers.

While the USB drivers get sorted out at least we can say that RISC OS actually operates on the RPi.

PowerVR/Imagination Technologies

Following the Demo scene? RPi thread, there’s some interest in OpenGL on RO there (maybe it’s ROOL forum members!). (Also non-RO thread)

Anyway, as PowerVR’s not relevant to the Raspberry Pi, is it Khronos and Neil Trevett we should approach? (Apparently nothing about raspberry on their forum.) Or is this a VideoCore binary blob issue?

It’ll be a VideoCore binary blob issue; Khronos have nothing to do with it.

AFAIK there’s no reason why we can’t have OpenGL on RISC OS (either for the Raspberry Pi or OMAP). All we need is for someone to sit down and construct a wrapper layer that will allow us to use the Linux binary blobs.

Thanks for the clarification. Maybe the Fedora Remix wiki will provide future pointers/contacts:

• Package Raspberry Pi Libraries
• FAQ

Some should be shipping today.

Hi all,
I have a Raspberry Pi in hand. I really want to contribute to this effort as a tester. I’m a project manager with previous software regression testing experience, and good soldering skills, but have relatively little time to spare. So, if anyone wants to help get me started and give me ‘use cases’ to test against, I’d be delighted to take part in the effort to make Risc OS work.

I also have a couple of ‘slice of pi’ prototyping boards, breadboard and plenty of PC components – so if any interface work is needed, I’m able to do this without fear of bricking the Pi.

Cheers,
Alex

Also, idea for a hack that might help bridge the gap while USB drivers are written:

Is it an easier job for anyone to program the GPIO pins to accept input from Serial mouse, PS/2 mouse/keyboard or even an Acorn quadrature mouse, to allow input?

Is it an easier job for anyone to program the GPIO pins to accept input from Serial mouse, PS/2 mouse/keyboard or even an Acorn quadrature mouse, to allow input?

As I understand it there is a serial port on the device. So IF a serial driver was already available or easy to implement, then a ROM with live images in resources and an onscreen keyboard might be an option.