Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By : Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials

By: Andrew K. Dennis, Teemu O Pohjanlehto

Overview of this book

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, a new series of the popular compact computer is available for you to build cheap, exciting projects and learn about programming. In this book, we explore Raspberry Pi 2’s hardware through a number of projects in a variety of programming languages. We will start by exploring the various hardware components in detail, which will provide a base for the programming projects and guide you through setting up the tools for Assembler, C/C++, and Python. We will then learn how to write multi-threaded applications and Raspberry Pi 2’s multi-core processor. Moving on, you’ll get hands on by expanding the storage options of the Raspberry Pi beyond the SD card and interacting with the graphics hardware. Furthermore, you will be introduced to the basics of sound programming while expanding upon your knowledge of Python to build a web server. Finally, you will learn to interact with the third-party microcontrollers. From writing your first Assembly Language application to programming graphics, this title guides you through the essentials.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Computer Architecture Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Sonic Pi


Sonic Pi is a free live coding synthesizer, which can be installed onto your Raspberry Pi to create generative compositions. It uses a very simple programming interface to allow you to generate your own sounds and musical pieces.

The official website for the application is http://sonic-pi.net/.

An example of the types of sound that can be generated can be found at http://sonic-pi.net/#examples.

The very first example at the site generates some bell sounds. The code to generate this is shown here:

loop do
  sample :perc_bell, rate: (rrand 0.125, 1.5)   
  sleep rrand(0, 2) 
end

As you can see, the minimal code they implemented on the example site generates some very interesting sounds.

We will now set up Sonic Pi and start experimenting with the programming code to generate all sorts of sounds.

Setup

Raspbian Jessie comes pre-installed with Sonic Pi. If you are using an earlier version of the Raspbian O/S, or find it is not installed, you can acquire it using apt-get:

sudo apt...