Raspery PI programming methods

[prabhukaran3]

Dear All,
How to program Raspery Pi.. I am having experience in PIC controllers.. Nut new to raspery pi board... Like PIC controllers,Is there many compilers available to program raspery PI? If yes please give your ans...

Why phython OS is more powerful.. What is the advantage of Rasperry Pi over PIC controllers?

 

[darkgnat]

Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip which is probably at least 10x as fast as the PICs that you are used to using (at least on core processing). It has a built in graphics processing unit as well which makes it easy to plug into a monitor. It typically runs a flavor of Linux. On mine I tend to program in c/c++ or python. C is typically faster (if you need speed) but Python is easier and usually "fast enough" for things that you might do on with the chip. PIC (which I also use) is a microcontroller with on chip SRAM and Flash. These are separate on the RPi . RPi is really a full general purpose computer with an operating system ready to go. PIC is obviously a lot more custom. You can do a lot of IO on both with I2C, SPI, RS232 etc, but the programming will be lower level on the PIC, as RPi uses the Linux hardware abstraction layer. Which one is easier depends on your experience I suppose. The RPi has a great community behind it and a lot of general purpose computing power. The primary limitation compared to the PIC is that the standard system is not real time, and it's considerably harder to control the timing of, whereas with the PIC you are in total control of your timing, but it doesn't have nearly the compute power that an RPi has which can have up to 1GHz clock and a full GPU.

I forgot to mention that Python isn't an OS, it's a byte compiled language that is typically a lot less "picky" than C and tends to be object oriented and easier to program with less for the programmer to keep up with. However for low level bit twiddling I find C just as easy or easier especially with bit and byte level operations. One cool thing is that you can program in python and then if you get a particularly "slow" portion of your program, then you can just write that portion as a C function, as it is fairly easy to interface a C library with python.