Raspberry Pi

A relatively underwhelming ARM development board to begin with that was upgraded to a very reasonably performing quad-core CPU in February 2015 and got built-in Wi-Fi in February 2016, and which eventually gave its name to an entire family of devices, from the to aarch64 boards.

Resources

Category Date Link Notes
Development 2012 pi3d

A simple wrapper atop the OpenGLES libraries that have been floating around

2019 dockerpi

a Docker image using QEMU to boot a Raspbian environment on Intel machines

Education 2020 PiNet

A boot server and management solution for classrooms

Emulation 2012 Emulator binaries

prebuilt MAME, MESS, etc

2013 Chameleon

An impressive emulator bundle

Firmware 2016 rpi-open-firmware

Open source VPU firmware

GUI 2022 slint

a GUI toolkit that can run in MCUs like the Pi pico and the ESP32

Graphics 2012 pyopengles

Uses the EGL and OpenGLES libraries to draw 3d graphics from inside Python with hardware acceleration.

2020 epaper.js

an ePaper display control hack that converts HTML to a monochrome PNG

2021 lazycast

a Miracast server for the Pi

Hardware Piunora

A tiny-but-mighty open-source carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM4

Media 2013 RasPlex

A nicely packaged Plex front-end

Music 2019 Orac

a modular synth engine

Networking 2023 pihole-readonly-rootfs

a read-only setup to run Pi-Hole

2024 pifi-openwrt-raspberry-pi

an OpenWRT-based project to quickly turn a Pi into a powerful travel router.

Operating Systems 2013 Moebius

A cut-down version of Raspbian with minimal footprint

2014 inferno-rpi

A native port of the Inferno OS

2015 resinOS

A Docker-centric distro for embedded devices

2018 interim

a minimalist operating system with a LISP shell

gokrazy

A minimal Go userland for the Pi 3 (aarch64)

2020 Elementary OS

Unofficial builds of Elementary for the Raspberry Pi 4

2021 Chromium OS Builds
Writing a bare metal operating system for Raspberry Pi 4

Very comprehensive. May be enough to bootstrap things like Inferno or the Java HaikuVM on it.

circle

A C++ bare metal environment

a C++ bare metal programming environment for the Raspberry Pi

hello system

a Mac-like BSD desktop environment that also runs on the Pi (no installation images, though)

2022 DietPi

An optimized Debian distribution with lower resource usage and support for other SBCs

2023 arm-tutorial-rpi

a tutorial on bare metal programming for the Raspberry Pi

Photography 2018 A Guide to Recording 660FPS Video On A $6 Raspberry Pi Camera
Reference 2012 Using OpenGL ES 2.0 on the Raspberry Pi without X windows

The first coherent summary I came across

Qt on Raspberry Pi

Notes on installing QtonPi

Setting up Scratchbox2 and QEMU

A good guide almost unbearably spoiled by screenshots of text instead of commands you can easily copy and paste to a console. Useful, but infuriating.

2020 Read-Only Raspberry Pi

Adafruit’s notes on configuring jessie for a read-only filesystem

Jeff Geerling's notes on USB boot and TRIM

Useful to enable TRIM on external SSDs

2021 Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi

Includes notes on audio and X setup. Has a few omissions (ignores the read-only overlay filesystem).

2024 extreme-pi-boot-optimization

optimizing boot processes and energy consumption for a solar-powered camera.

References 2012 Raspberry Pi Tuning

Notes on removing most of the gunk in the standard distro

Software 2014 PiWall

A simple videowall solution

dispmanx_vnc

A VNC server that shares your the framebuffer

Thin Clients 2015 PiNet

A Linux-centric thin-client solution for classrooms

WTware

A Windows/Remote Desktop oriented thin-client distro

Tools 2012 Debian Lenny and Squeeze armel images for QEMU

I’ve used these for a while now, and they’re quite useful for testing (even if compiling is dog slow).

rpi-update

a simple firmware updater

2024 RaspberryPi_WebRTC

a low-latency home security camera using a Raspberry Pi and WebRTC

pi-ci

a virtual machine setup for creating Pi 3, 4 & 5 configurations

USB 2022 bt2usbhid

a way to use your Bluetooth peripherals with another computer using a Raspberry Pi as a converter

Video 2021 showmewebcam

a prebuilt image that uses uvc-gadget to turn a Pi into a USB web cam with extensive configuration options

piwebcam

a prebuilt image that supports motion detection and image analysis

Survival Tips

Use vnc4server, not tightvncserver

If you’re using an older version of Raspbian and want to access your board via , you should grab a copy of the vnc4server sources from and rebuild it on the Pi. vnc4server has much less latency and performs much better overall, at least for my use cases:

# on a Ubuntu box
$ mkdir tmp; cd tmp
$ apt-get source vnc4server
# find the source tree and rsync it across to the Pi
# ...time passes...

# on the Pi, cd into the source tree and do:
$ debuild -us -uc
# ...a lot of time passes...
$ cd ..; sudo apt-get install xbase-clients x11-apps; sudo dpkg -i vnc4server*.deb

This page is referenced in: