RE: Installing EPICS on the Raspberry Pi

[Emmanuel Mayssat <emayssat@outlook.com>]

There are at least 4 ways to bring EPICS on Raspberry Pi
1. Compile directly on target as you suggested (slow)
2. NFS mount the raspberry Pi and cross compile on build host (fast)
3. Mount Fash EEPROM on build host and cross compile (faster)
4. Mirror the Flash EEPROM from another one where EPICS was previously built for Pi (fastest)

Cross-compiling for the Pi is an interesting exercise on its own.
1. Install the crosstool chain (gcc and the like for arm platform on the intel-based build host)
2. In your configure directory, add the CROSS_COMPILER_TARGET_ARCHS=linux-arm in the CONFIG_SITE
3. Make sure that in the configure/os directory you have all the CONFIG.<build_host_arch>.<target_arch>
    i.e. CONFIG.linux-x86_64.linux-arm
4. In the CONFIG_SITE.Common.linux-arm set
  #Cross tool location
  GNU_DIR=/usr/local/opt/crosstool/arm-linux/gcc-3.3.4-glibc-2.3.2
  #gcc target?
  GNU_TARGET = arm-linux
  #Build libs and bins
  VALID_BUILDS = Ioc Host
5. Compile epics base on build host for target architecture
6.
When you work with embedded system, here you normally would have to deploy the newly compiled binaries to the target host (using scp for example). But because with the raspPi you can (method 2) NFS mount, or (3,4) move the Flash disk you don't have to do that.

When cross compiling EPICS, you don't have to install epics-base, synapps, etc on the target hardware, but just the final statically-built IOC binary file. With the RaspPi, we can obviously follow both approaches.

Thank you for the doc.
--
Emmanuel

> Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 12:24:49 -0600
> From: jemian@ANL.GOV
> To: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
> Subject: Installing EPICS on the Raspberry Pi
>
>
> I've just published a how_I_did_it for the Raspberry Pi
>
> http://prjemian.github.io/epicspi/
>
> As for last year's discussion, it does not use the I/O pins on the PI.
>
> * Raspberry Pi Distribution
> * Preparing for EPICS
> * EPICS Base
> * synApps
> * PyEpics
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Pete R. Jemian, Ph.D. <jemian@anl.gov>
> Beam line Controls and Data Acquisition, Group Leader
> Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory
> Argonne, IL 60439 630 - 252 - 3189
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Education is the one thing for which people
> are willing to pay yet not receive.
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>