Raspberry Pi Workshop for KPI students

By: Segiy Sergienko, 24 Oct 2016
3 minutes

Reading Time: 3 minutes

More than 80 participants joined the Raspberry Pi workshop held by Sirin Software and Lampa Lab at Belka’s coworking space at Ukraine’s National Technical University – Kiev Polytechnic Institute.

The workshop was given by Sirin Software CEO Alex Nikitenko, and Software Engineer Dmitriy Vitman, both of whom have deep experience in embedded software development.  

All participants practiced coding pure C and ARM assembler, without the OS itself, in order to explore the machinery that runs under the hood of the operating system.

Topics covered at the workshop included:

  1. The basic process for downloading and installation of software development tools for Raspberry Pi (RPI) without Linux;
  2. The main steps of RPI booting;
  3. How to use RPI with GPIO on the register level;
  4. How to flash LED with Bare Metal programming;
  5. How to debug programs through the serial RPI port (uart);
  6. Ways to handle timers by polling and interrupts.

This interactive workshop was designed to help students explore  processes that go beyond OS and deepen understanding of boot and CPU-Peripheral’s communication processes. All attendees were engaged in discussion; working in small groups they were equipped with Raspberry Pi boards, so everybody had a chance to test programs on RPI and get feedback quickly.

We are getting positive feedback from participants and have decided to do similar workshops in the future.

We greatly appreciate your comments, opinions, and advice on topics for further workshops. We look forward to hearing from you at [email protected]