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Contemplating changing the approach from a collection of samples to a book

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or manual that flows through the examples.
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dwelch67
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I am contemplating a do-over on this Raspberry Pi Bare Metal Programming
repo.
Bare Metal Programming simply means no operating system. Although we
could, we are not going to run off and make a gui based web browser
or anything like that. Bare metal is often used for things like
booting a computer or the software that runs an alarm clock or TV
remote control. We are of course going to do it here for fun and
education. The purpose of the Raspberry Pi is education, for every
million or so Python programmers we need a bare metal programmer. The
Raspberry Pi has pros and cons for use in learning bare metal
programming. On the pro side the peripherals are relatively easy to
program on the con side the vendor provided documentation is far from
the best I have seen.
Most of bare metal programming has to do with things other than writing
programs. Reading datasheets, programmers reference manuals, schematics
are all at the center of bare metal programming. You dont have to be
a computer engineer nor electrical engineer, if/when you do this
professionally then there should be electrical engineers that you work
very closely with, they do their thing, you do yours. Hopefully I can
hold your hand through the electrical part.
Some assembly language programming is required for bare metal
programming, the bulk of bare metal is C. One nice thing about bare
metal programming is that the programming itself does not have
to be that complicated. You need to have some programming experience
here, doesnt have to be assembly language nor C although C would help.
I will try to explain the assembly language, and the C should feel
relatively natural for an experienced programmer, just a matter of
syntax.
My statistic above about a million to one Python to bare metal
programmers is completely made up, but the percentage of bare metal
programmers to other forms is a very small number. This means for
example the documentation we need is read by a relatively small
number of people, it only has to be good enough, doesnt have to be
great. Likewise, more than the programming languages themselves
(generally C with some assembly language) we do have to beat the
programming tools into submission (assembler, compiler, linker) because
we are going to use them in a way that is equally rarely used.
The last word on bare metal programming in this introduction before
we go onto what you need is that unlike programming an application
on top of your favorite operating system, with bare metal programming
it is possible to destroy hardware. Sometimes you "let the smoke out"
(the joke is there is a finite amount of smoke in chips and if you
let even a little bit out the chip wont work) and sometimes you "brick"
the system. Bricking something in this context means that you have
done something fatal to the hardware that doesnt let the smoke out
but the board/product is not much more than a paperweight or a brick
you might use to hold a door open. On the good side, so far as we
know, you cannot brick a Raspberry Pi, if your program crashes you do
have the tools to fix it, in this case the tool is removing the sd card
and replacing the program that crashed with one that doesnt. With
hardware other than the raspberry pi, there are various levels of pain
for bricking a board sometimes you might be able to recover the board
with a JTAG debugger. Sometimes you can get a soldering iron out and
remove and replace some components. It is all part of the experience
unfortunately. With the raspberry pi if you are careful not to
short anything out (dont touch the board with metal items, dont set it
on metal items, basically dont create an electrical connection between
any two exposed bits of metal on the board) and when connecting the
serial interface below or other additional items we may talk about
you dont get those connections wrong, you shouldnt have any smoke or
bricking problems with your Raspberry Pi. I will not take any
responsibility for you damaging your hardware.
Take a deep breath, you CAN do this...
Naturally you will need a raspberry pi. I am probably going to use
my Model A for much of this since I added a reset button to it. I have
a number of Raspberry Pi boards, and for the most part this material
should work on all of them. If something board specific comes along,
we will deal with it then.
Looks like folks are retiring the Model A, Adafruit also showed the
Model A as retired.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/11837
The Model B that is the same pc board as my Model A, but has more stuff
on it (and costs a little more).
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11546
The B+ works fine, if you dont have any Raspberry Pi and want to use
it for more than just this bare metal the B+ is a pretty good looking
first Raspberry Pi board as of this writing. Note that you dont have
to sacrifice your linux install on your Raspbery Pi to play with
bare metal, renaming a file will preserve that, as you will see.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12977
Why they didnt start from the beginning with a micro sd slot I will
never understand, and the way the full sized sd slot sits so that
the card hangs way out the side. I have broken a number of sd cards
in those slots, this little adapter board is wonderful for converting
to a micro sd slot in a durable way. This board is not required but
you certainly have to have an sd card that fits in the board you are
using. It does not have to be a huge card (huge as in lots of
gigabytes) in fact we will be using three fairly small files and that
is it, early testing my old cards measured in megabytes didnt work
for some reason, and 2GB and maybe even 4GB cards are harder and
harder to find. But whatever the popular size is under $10 or so
should work just fine.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12824
I hate to do this but almost immediately you will need a serial
interface to the Raspberry Pi to continue this tutorial. Computers
in general do not ship with serial ports any more, and even if they
did you cant wire that directly up to this board, the voltage levels
are wrong (smoke will come out somewhere). The best solution is some
flavor of usb to serial and it has to be 3.3V not 5.0V (smoke). This
cable with an integrated usb to serial built in is ideal. You dont
have to shop at sparkfun, in the USA it is a great place for this kind
of stuff, and easy on the wallet as far as shipping goes, from the
picture the wires appear to be labelled, you can probably find these
usb to TTL 3.3v serial cables all kinds of places, ebay, etc. They
may not have labelled ends and if you are not experienced at electrical
engineering and have the tools (multimeter, maybe a scope, etc) you
dont want to just guess at it (smoke).
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12977
You could go with other usb to serial and separately buy the usb
cable and the hook up wires, but that is more expensive. At the same
time if you stick with bare metal programming beyond the Raspberry
Pi, you will need tools like these in your toolbox. A uart/serial
port is still one of your primary debugging interfaces.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9873
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9140
The first documents you will need are found here
You will want to go here
http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware
And get the datasheet for the part
http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf
(might be an old link, find the one on the wiki page)
And the schematic for the board
http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Raspberry-Pi-Schematics-R1.0.pdf
(might be an old link, find the one on the wiki page)
As well as some documents from ARM.