The “start here” point in Ultibo

Ultibo is the very new / completely different way of programming for Raspberry Pi. You are no longer installing any kind of Linux on your RPi and writing some app or script for it.

Instead:

  • You create your own kernel image, in which you can do virtually anything
  • For very simple solutions your entire RPi “system” can be as small as 1 MB
  • You’re programming everything that you need using Free Pascal in a modified Lazarus IDE

Developing anything from scratch sounds like a extremely huge and overwhelming task. More like inventing the wheel again. Well… not necessary.

6+ years of development of Ultibo caused it to have an impressive number of things already done, waiting for you to be cherry-picked from scratch. And similarly impressive helpful society.

That’s why before:

  • Asking yourself, what can I do with Ultibo or is it a good choice for my project?
  • Asking someone else, if this or that is possible or how to achieve something?

You should definitely visit the Forum Quick Reference page.

It includes:

  • Over one hundred links to forum resources (mostly forum topics) including:
    • General development:
      • General and advanced programming topics
      • Details on using Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE
      • Using bundled libraries and third party components
    • Specific development areas and topics:
      • Graphics and displays
      • Console, keyboard and mouse
      • Files, disk, partitions and drives (FAT, NTFS etc.)
      • Networking and protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP etc.)
      • Time and date
    • Hardware:
      • Hardware, devices, drivers and interrupts
      • Boards and platforms (Raspberry Pi + QEMU)
      • Threads, locks and memory
    • Updating and deploying applications
  • Ten links to official resources, including demos, examples, videos, API documentation and supported hardware

Of course, nobody expects you to read through all those 110+ links / topics, before you actually start coding or asking questions. But, even browsing through the above list can give you a vast overview on how complex and flexible in the same time Ultibo is, what it offers to you and what you can achieve with it.

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