Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was created for learning! Even the example code (read I2C temp sensor, display using webserver) they give on the home page starts with: "// Copyright (c) Microsoft. All rights reserved.". Why would you want this? Can there really be people that are willing and able to build their own IOT but do not want to learn about Linux?
Knowing about Linux doesn't mean assuming it's the best tool for the job at hand.
I've used Linux, I've installed Linux, I've fixed a couple of broken Linux installs etc. I've compiled software on Linux. I've imaged an SD card for a Pi from Windows pre-Noobs. I've installed Rasbian using NOOBS.
I've also played with Arduinos, although mainly using other peoples' libraries for time and network comms etc.
I have not, however, written any serious software for Linux and I am not a Linux developer. I mostly use VS on Windows to develop software that will end up on Windows computers to be used by Windows users.
I have the required physical equipment, software and skillset to make a solution that meets the end requirements using 10 Core on a Pi 2. I don't have that for Rasbian. I've no doubt Lady Ada has a tutorial somewhere to teach me enough to get it working, but why would I invest my time in that?
I'd be better off using the skills I already have to accomplish this task. Then learning something completely different that will allow me to accomplish an end result I can't presently achieve.
At some point they might get curious and try Linux on it as well, but I'm all for whatever makes it easier for someone to get into trying something new without a lot of burden. For some people that means using Windows so they can use the platform and tooling they're most familiar with (Visual Studio and .net).
Yes, there's mono and such, but even that still brings its own complexity when you actually consider what else it takes to get set up and going for someone that's never used Linux before (or outside of some courses in college).
It's like wanting to build furniture, but then told you should plant a tree, wait for that tree to grow, chop it down, cut it up for wood, then you can start building some furniture. Most people would give up long before actually making any furniture in that case.
I previously tried Mono on the Pi and it had lots of bugs related to the processor architecture. Problems with the hard float support stopped things like Datetime from working properly.
This was a while ago so I imagine it's been fixed in a recent build. It shouldn't be a problem on the newer architecture of the Pi 2 either.
I think it's better to bite the bullet and just learn Linux and Python. You can then add those skills to your CV along with Windows and C#.
Absolutely, and especially in corporate environments. I'm not saying Windows 10 IoT is any better (I think it's very unlikely to be, but I also haven't evaluated it), but I can say for certain that I wish I had a single, identical python library for any IoT platform that handled interfaces as simply as:
with pin_1 as p1:
p1.output(1)
time.sleep(2)
p1.output(0)
void loop()
{
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // sets the LED on
delay(1000); // waits for a second
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // sets the LED off
delay(1000); // waits for a second
}Even something that seems as complex as as reading a sensor and writing data out to a CF card doesn't require an OS if the basic library support is there.
from time import sleep
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(2, GPIO.OUT)
while 1:
GPIO.output(2, False)
sleep(2)
GPIO.output(2, True)
Also, the sysfs mappings that the easy bindings tend to be written from are very, very slow (like ~3+ orders of magnitude slower than they should be: http://hackaday.com/2013/12/07/speeding-up-beaglebone-black-...).
Why would I put an OS on a computationally constrained device that is essentially guaranteed to spend a portion of the CPU time doing things I likely don't want done, for someone else (Microsoft in this case)?
My experience with Linux on the Pi is that it just works out of the box. Simple things that you need to install a driver for on Windows are plug and play on Linux [0].
I installed the desktop Windows 10 preview just to flash the SD card. Although I read in the Mag Pi [1] that there is a Python script [2] to convert the image to a normal format.
I'm a big fan of C# and I'm a professional .NET developer. It's my go to stack. Yet, I believe that the best way to use a Raspberry Pi is with Python on Linux.
[0] https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-electricity-monitor
I'd host the file but I imagine it will go out of date pretty quickly as MS change the original.
Granted, if you go through the developer site, it points you towards installing what you need to develop software for it. shrug
Then flash it with your normal tool such as dd or Win32DiskImager.
In case you're interested: https://github.com/lawl/Win10IOTRaspberryUnpacker
The script makes an 8GB file by default but it should be possible to change that. Add a parameter for the size of the card or even auto-detect it.
I've documented the process and written up my thoughts on IoT core here: https://unop.uk/dev/windows-10-iot-core-public-release-for-r...
That requirement itself is a big step:
On my wife's laptop I had even tried a fresh install of Windows 7 followed immediately by the upgrade and hit the same bugs as before (no "Modern" apps would load including Settings, and Explorer.exe was constantly crashing). A clean install of 10 fixed those issues and now it runs great.
Fixed now, thanks.
There must be something about their business model I'm not getting. Going to microsoft.com with the intent of buying Windows to install it on a naked PC or in a VM on OSX, I have yet to identify an option that allows me to: 1) buy a license, 2) download an ISO image.
The closest solution I've seen is to download some exe file that presupposes that I have Windows installed somewhere so I can....do god knows what to get an install going.
I know what I came to the site for. Instead the site spends all its energy on selling me on the idea of Windows and then fails to sell me the product.
Consistently.
For years.
Why? Do they not want my business? Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?
This is neither hyperbole nor gratuitous negativism, but Microsoft is perhaps the worst company to buy a product from online. Microsoft fixing this is the litmus test for when they might, and I would like to emphasize might, be able to stop sucking.
Windows is only £80 or so and there was a big button on the nag screens that took me to the Windows site to buy a licence. Great - credit card in hand I clicked on through and was instantly greeted with buy Windows 8.1 screens.
The problem is, I absolutely did not want under any circumstances to install 8.1. I just wanted a legit licence to the already installed 7, which the computer was quite happily running and required no learning/explaining of metro to my mother.
For nearly 1 hour I tried to find a way to buy that Windows 7 licence key and found absolutely no way to do it.
That has been known to happen [1] (it's never happened to me personally). I suspect it has something to do with buggy AV or anti-malware software.
> For nearly 1 hour I tried to find a way to buy that Windows 7 licence key and found absolutely no way to do it.
You don't have a Best Buy type store near you?
[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2859267/operating-systems/w...
Not really, they want the business of IT departments of medium/large companies, running full Windows stacks (Windows Enterprise, Office, Windows Server, MS Sql Server, Exchange), which buy licenses by the dozen (at least) through their purchasing department.
It's how they make(a lot of) money.
My guess they did that because it's probably just like BartPE or other PE products - it copies files from the underlying OS.
> Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?
There is nothing stopping you from running Windows in a VM - millions of people do it all over the world.
Still it is a step in the right direction for Microsoft. I am happy to see them doing such things. Competition in the IoT space is a good thing for all.
I agree, too -- and this phrase has been on the minds of people while installing Microsoft products for decades now. It's in their DNA somehow, it seems.
Do not interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
> Developers, Developers, Developers
I've always cracked up whenever I see Ballmer's developers video, so I was pretty happy that Microsoft's IoT team has a sense of humor and was able to get that approved (if they had to)
reference if you haven't seen the original Ballmer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
So, for how long can you run a RPi 2 from a CR2032 cell or an AAA battery? A minute or two on full bore? Because that's the kind of energy budget people are generally talking about when they mean internet of things.
The RPi2 is a fully-featured media center, not a door lock or light switch or power sensor.
I guess the problem for Microsoft with the whole IoT thing is simply that they will never have Windows there, the devices you actually use for IoT measure their RAM in KiB. And, frankly, operating systems are very far down the on list of things we need to make IoT a reality.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think some credit is due
I'm a little confused as to what Windows brings to the table for embedded devices at this point, especially screenless ones.
Just try using VS for C++ development, even the primitive Qt Creator tops it.
I will agree with you about the documentation, with few exceptions MS documentation is some of the best written. But this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap.
The piss poor code editing tools in VC++ irk me more than anything, I have to say that I feel like it's the worst of these platforms. Resharper for C++ is coming though, so maybe that'll change my mind.
I wanted to write a simple tool to mute a game when I tabbed out of it.
No access to per-app volume controls from .NET without the use of some random paid libraries. So I went with C++. Access via C++ involved incredibly complicated COM APIs, which were very poorly documented (the whole COM system itself was confusing but these APIs in particular involved a ridiculous level of nesting) and no good clear examples were available.
Easily more confusing than the simple calls into the DBus interface for pulseaudio to achieve the same thing on an Ubuntu desktop system.
When I started Android development, the quality of documentation was so far below what I was used to from Microsoft that it hurt. If not for StackOverflow I would probably have given up and switched to Microsoft's mobile platform.
Besides that, I'm not impressed by IntelliJ. Not even a little bit. I am however, vastly impressed by Visual Studio and all the IDE's that are based on it.
You want to see some poorly documented stuff, check out BouncyCastle's "lightweight API" or OpenSceneGraph. Great libraries, but figuring them out is a serious investment.
Maybe Android docs aren't so bad in comparison to most documentation. However, in comparison to Microsoft's they are severely lacking. And this is coming from someone who used to bitch at all the errors he found in the Microsoft docs!
I'm using visual studio nearly daily for C++, nothing wrong with it (except it lacked vim binding for which - there is an extension.)
Am I missing something?
- Visualization of threads and their stacks contents
- Customizable breakpoints in many different ways (conditions, hit count, only on special thread)
- Visualization of tasks (PPL)
- Its STL visualizers are much nicer to use and customize than any of the alternatives
- Selective control of threads execution behavior
- Re-execution of code blocks
- Ability to perform code navigation across .obj and .dll files without access to source code (only on Architect version)
Yeah sure, gdb can have some of this stuff, it even allows for some kind of C/C++ REPL, but I won't be debugging parallel code with it.
When debugging I'm most often able to solve things with a few breakpoints, a stack dump and little else. The situations where that's insufficient for me are few and far between. When I'm debugging some code using old threading paradigms I more often than not just break out helgrind on it, which often reveals threading problems instantly. It's unavailable on Windows though.
The Eclipse comment got me to stop here…signup, and write.
I have been a Wintel developer for 25 years. I make a modest 6-figure income writing C#/MSSQL apps (after years of (Clipper, C, C++ and Delphi) that run large businesses. I mainly write multi-threaded server apps (most from the ground up, not WCF/SOAP) but I do still venture into the GUI work and even WPF/MVVM these days. I prefer MSSQL over Oracle any day, no comparison for 99% of what is needed out there. I love Hyper-V and VMWare (even when the Linux-lineage rears its head). My server in the basement is loaded with 140TB of very redundant storage. So, not the overage scrip kiddie who picked up this computer stuff last year.
I completely gave up on Linux and any OpenSource development tools a few years ago, my personality and mind (of lack of) just couldn’t deal with it. It is completely frustrating to deal with almost-no-docs, partial thoughts of most users, buzzwords, short-hand, almost no attention to detail, and often from guys living in mom's basement, that have no need to generate output and earn a paycheck.
I know that sounds harsh, but it is based on my experience with software development. I tried to cope with the Linux ecosystem for 10 years, it had to stop.
It does, (or did) take days to install the completely unfocused IDE Eclipse and the Android SDK (Java itself to a lesser degree). People (I will call them “enthusiasts”) with lots of time, and little experience writing maintainable software, might enjoy the challenge - but I called it hell – I could give endless examples of zero-docs or absolutely wrong examples, docs and walk-throughs. Almost every doc I ever found on setting up Linux-ish (servers) or Android dev environments, etc. was completely full of errors, and the user community seemed to love their walk through their fields of mines. And I believe that is because the authors/users can get away it - production and earning is not key, playing and killing time seems to be the focus. This is fine I guess, but not for me. I must provide value to my customers/employers and write software that is maintainable. MS and VS allow me to do this with relative ease. MS has its faults, and I can list bugs in Windows that may never be fixed.
Look at the Storage Spaces mess. Look at awesome ZFS (I mean that) – and only 1 PhD required to implement and properly maintain it under Linux, with storage beyond a minimal size. Look at the nightmare of Linux, storage controllers, trying to figure out what drive has what serial #, and is attached to what port, CLI and Gerp Hell. I bet FreeNAS still forces someone into spending a day to get all the apps required to pipe and redirect and Grep 20 apps, just right (oops the doc was wrong again) to find the one bad drive and drive serial#. MS with all its faults, smiles at this kind of mess. They usually improve on this, although I can’t say Storage Spaces is an example of this.
It is my strong opinion (but I haven’t had the pleasure in doing) that all one needs to do to support my point, is take a group of average to above-average users/people and give them the mission of getting a dev environment setup to take some input from a user, open a socket and send that data somewhere. All Linux attempts will fail (with hostile screaming involved), most MS VS C# attempts will succeed (with minimal cursing). It really is that simple to demonstrate. One can play around with horrible docs and horrible tools or one can express their thoughts and solutions and earn a paycheck (if you're into that kind of thing). And for real comedy, ask those same test subject to setup an SMB server, in Linux and in Windows. I think you get my point, if you are not the 1 in 1000 Linux users that knows how to do that.
Nothing makes me happier than Win10 IoT Core on Raspberry. I like Arduino, I use it when I have/need to, Netduino was OK but hit its limits, but I now, in 2015, I have a rock-solid IDE and C# at my fingertips, and Raspberry and Minnowboard, my higher-level projects will now be a breeze to implement. I am sure I will experience some pain but MS always gets it together for the developers. We are all of course doing different things for different reasons. I like to build home automation solutions for myself and friends (not commercially). So my Win10 IoT Core vs. Linux views come from that limited slant.
I am not wanting to argue, that happens everywhere, I simply wanted to share my point of view as I remember my Eclipse Android SDK nightmares of a few years ago. We can completely disagree on some or all of this and still enjoy the comments on this thread. I smile and laughed at some of the comments here. Fun stuff. Good luck.
With a copy of Clipper and Brief[0] I used to conquer the world.
I was a demon with the Clipper TBrowse object :) Happy days.
Now, I hear MS' tools compare favorably with Jetbrains'. If that's true, that sounds like a pretty decent platform to me.
Unix/Linux CLI is a core set of tools that get you at literally everything you could want and give you unbounded power and flexibility.
Worlds apart.
Bullshit. It's engineering rule that all Microsoft products have all the admin capabilities exposed via powershell.
Most admin gui's are now simply a call to a powershell command.
You can pipe, and redirect input/output just like unix shells.
And let's not talk about the shell itself which -- dear lord.
Meanwhile Unix folk will never realize how much time they waste with broken scripts that have three sets of nested escaped quotes just so they can get text from one place to another -- even though "plain text is everything" hasn't really solved problems in a robust fashion since the 80s. Add in six different variations on regular expressions, a couple Python 2 vs 3 wars, endless battles of how to handle service startup, and the the fact that basic tools like sed and grep are stuck in some BSD never-never land on the Mac and you've got yourself a real mess.
So when you're writing a script to move users, mailboxes and databases around? Maybe that PowerShell ain't so verbose after all. Better to type a little more now than deal with the pissed-off VP with an umlaut in his name later.
And today visual studio 2013 crashed on me a relatively low 11 times...
Oh and I had to fix a script that tried to deploy sql server instances and pretty much entirely fucked up my workstation.
This is every day when your product gets large.
Installing an ARM toolchain is simple now. Don't build one unless you really need to (or you install Yocto).
apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabiBack when I wrote it, in the gcc 4.3.3 days, I don't even think gcc had a release manager --- we're talking clean, out-of-the-box build failures here.
It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard.
For ARM it takes 90 seconds in Debian/Ubuntu. I posted the command right above.
And the larger chipmakers will provide or point you to relevant toolsets or include them with their IDEs. Even the large independent IDE makers wrap their stuff around gcc now.
But there isn't a MIPS toolchain. Or an m68k toolchain. Or a sparc toolchain. Or an alpha toolchain. Or an SH toolchain. There is a Hitachi H8 toolchain, but it's based on 3.4.6. There's an MSP430 toolchain, but you don't want to use it, as it's achingly old and can brick some modern MSP430 devices. etc.
Typically, when working on an embedded device, the very first thing you do is spend far too many frustrating hours trying to beat gcc into shape, and that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that the packages for all these things aren't built and pushed to Debian automatically every time a gcc release is done indicates that something is very wrong somewhere...
For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit.
On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.
If you've never really used Microsofts tools before and all that you've heard about Microsoft has originated from the crowd that hangs out at HN, you can be forgiven for not knowing that they make very fine quality tools.
The tools might be great, but I don't ship tools. I ship applications that need good solid runtime libraries.
Win10 might be a fresh start and that's all well-and-good. But I'll believe it when I see it. Slapping on a buzzword like "IoT" won't change things. I develop lots of IoT stuff and I see no reason to go near Win10.
The flavors of Windows that you mention are part of a longer term story, and are really just two operating systems: Windows CE and Windows NT. Windows CE was important for targeting the small devices of the 90's era in which it was developed. Now we can run NT on the 'small' devices that we have today. I think that's pretty cool. Now we have Linux and NT (and FreeBSD, etc.) and we have more choices.
EDIT: Phrasing
Funny how things change. A Raspberry Pi isn't a "small" embedded device. It's a small desktop device. It just happens to get embedded in a lot of stuff now.
I still can't/won't run WinNT on the 72MHz Cortex-M3 (w/64KiB SRAM) that's the core of my customer's current product.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/11/12/i...
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emu...
Of course, one can also use Xamarin. I doubt they'll try to compete with the tools for Java.
(used by a lot of Ford cars)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi
Ubuntu Snappy Core (also marketed for IoT)... mmm not so much great. IMO still few community and howtos for building your snappy apps (even Raspbian is better)
So no - there is no good reason for making Win 10 essential, beyond corporate dementia.
Seriously. Why on Earth does MS seem to think there's going to be a stampede to install an OS that doesn't do anything outstandingly special, has a high cost of entry (in time and effort, if you don't want Win 10) and is already competing with a good few established contenders?
Windows 10 IoT Core doesn't have a shell. It's only worth putting on the Pi if you have a Windows 10 app developed for it.
Well if I can get flash and silverlight to work, that would make my raspberry pi Media Center complete. When you work with raspberry pi you will realize how limited it is. Even most popular programs that work with Ubuntu does not work with it. I still can't even a decent browser on it, and by decent I mean something that only uses up < 80% CPU.
The hardware compatibility part of the release notes look like a bad linux install from 1995, which is pretty funny.
I've got beaglebones and RPis that I'd love to give Windows 10 a play on, but they've shot themselves in the foot by supporting such a small part of the hardware market.
I've been a microsoft fan for a long time, I have a Windows 10 laptop, Windows Phone, and want to at least give them a try for IoT (though I have no problem with my linux installs), but I think they've lost me on this one.
Who thought they could come into a market which is well served by the linux community, offer very little if anything compared to what is already available, make it difficult to install, have it work on a small subset of hardware, and make it a success.
I don't understand Microsoft's strategy here at all!
(of course we rolled our own :))
http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/LabVIEW-for-Ra...
you're right tho, most tools from win32 won't work.
It's a trap!
edit: oh no, I've run afoul of the Broadcom shills. Oh well.
I'm not encouraging any particular software package, simply correcting a misconception.
Maybe I'm wrong and they mean a person or organization, in which case I'm not sure who they mean. Windows does not appear on the official Raspberry Pi website front page or blog.
But I have zero interest in migrating any of my perfectly fine Windows 7 systems to Windows 10. Other than a shiny "FREE!" sticker, I have yet to see a compelling case for me to upgrade.