So you're a mobile/embedded Java developer who just can't get enough time with your devices? Need to get your JDK/JavaFX ARM fix on the go? It's easy and inexpensive to do just that with only a few essential parts:
- Raspberry Pi
- Atrix Lapdock, which provides portable keyboard/video/mouse and power for the Raspberry Pi!
- A few cables and adapters (shown in videos, described in linked article below)
- SD card (8G or more, Class 6 or higher)
- Edimax EW-7811Un wi-fi adapter
That's all the hardware you'll need to make some serious, very portable ARM Java magic. Total cost was under $120 when I started this adventure; YMMV. :-)
There are a few differences between setting up the soft-float (SF) and hard-float (HF) versions of Raspbian, but this recent post covers the basics of getting an OS on the SD card for booting and configuring the Pi. The two key differences between SF and HF configuration to this point:
- Overclocking. HF Raspbian allows for easy overclocking from the raspi-config utility. A word of warning, though: The OS devs caution that the maximum overclocking setting has been known to corrupt SD cards, and I've found this to be the case several times. Stepping down one level to the next-to-fastest overclocking setting works a treat.
- Wi-fi configuration. SF Debian/Raspbian wi-fi configuration can be best accomplished using the instructions in the aforementioned post. Trying the same thing in HF Raspbian results in a message suggesting the use of the wi-fi graphical configuration tool...and it's even easier. With the Edimax, all I did was boot with both ethernet cable & Edimax connected, sudo su, startx, and run wpa_gui under the Internet menu (WiFi Config on the desktop if not root). Fill in your wi-fi details (I used WPA2/CCMP for my WAP) and then File|Save Configuration when finished. Quick, easy, and done. :-)
Below are links to a couple of short video tours of my mobile Java/JavaFX "testing rig". I'd embed them directly if the Roller blog software supported it (if someone knows how, please let me know!). After the video links is a link to an article/video I used as a template when I originally made mine. Great stuff, fun, and extremely useful...for me, anyway. Hope you enjoy it!
Video 1: Intro to Raspberry Pi & Atrix Lapdock, Part 1 of 2
Video 2: Follow-on to Raspberry Pi & Atrix Lapdock, Part 2 of 2
Happy hardware hacking,
Mark