Monday 16th October.

Garry Wood from ultibo.org presented on the Ultibo platform. Ultibo allows developers to create software that runs on a Raspberry Pi without the overheads of an operating system.

He showed how easy it was to write an Ultibo program and to deploy it to a Raspberry Pi. Ultibo programs are developed using customised versions of Lazarus and the FreePascal compiler, which can be downloaded from ultibo.org/download

The compiler generates a kernel7.img file which you copy to the SD card, with a few firmware files from Raspbian. If you have included ShellUpdate in the uses clause of your Ultibo program, you can then update the program without removing the SD card from the Pi.

Ultibo includes drivers for an expanding list of devices, with support for a variety of display devices, many USB devices, and the VideoCore IV GPU. Garry showed how a real time clock could easily be added to a Raspberry Pi.

Ultibo includes much of the functionality of an operating system, including multi-threading and pre-emptive multi-tasking, but they describe it as an embedded kernel. It has less overheads and is easier to maintain than a Pi using Raspbian or other OS.

The meeting was held at the Melbourne Men’s Shed, situated in the Federation Square Car Park building, off Russell St Extension.