Raspberry Pi

Introduction

Raspberry Pi is an ARM based single-board computer, developed for educational purposes, costing USD 25. For more details, see the Wikipedia article about Raspberry Pi, or the FAQ list.

Links

• The state of GHC on ARM blog of bgamari at 2020-05-15
• Steps to get Haskell software running on Raspberry Pi

• GHC Cross Compiler for Raspberry Pi

• Some observations/problems of getting Haskell/GHC running on the Raspberry Pi (Reddit)

• The official Raspberry Pi site

• Running Haskell on Raspberry Pi (blog)

• Raspberry Pi in a Haskell Cloud (blog)

• Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell (GHC 7) on ARM

• Haskell/GHC observations on the official Raspberry Pi forum

• Guide to Haskell ARM compilers, cross-compilers, and QEMU

• A script to install Stack on Raspbian

• A post about using Haskell to control a thermal printer from a Raspberry Pi. Quickly goes through how Stack can now install all dependencies seamlessly, except the LLVM-3.7 Also nice basic example on processing images and using the Serial port.

GHC Status

Of the "official" images currently available from the Raspberry Pi Downloads page, the following versions of GHC are available

• Arch Linux - 6.12.3-1
• Debian Squeeze - 6.12.1-13
• Debian Wheezy - 7.4.1-3
• Raspbian Jessie - 7.6.3-21+rpi1

Note: GHCi does not work on ARM with older versions, but it has become available in GHC 7.8. See this post on haskell-cafe for the status as of December 2013. Success with 7.8 on a Raspberry Pi 2.

There seemed to be a point where GHCi was merged into version 7.4.2., and it may still be possible to install it in an experimental manner, but it is not (currently) available in the Debian Raspberry Pi repository. Here is a discussion thread wherein djhuk describes compiling and installing GHC-7.4.2 via QEMU to the Raspberry Pi, with incomplete GHCi functionality.

To build a cross-compiler from Linux to Raspberry Pi (running Raspbian), see the GHC Trac.

Libraries

• pi-lcd

This package allows using an Adafruit character LCD and keypad kit on a Raspberry Pi from Haskell.

The package on Hackage

On GitHub

The announcement

• wiringPi

A Haskell binding to the wiringPi library, for using GPIO on the Raspberry Pi

The package on Hackage

On GitHub

The announcement

Current Issues

The main issue encountered so far is the memory limitations of the devices with 256 MB RAM; GHC will execute fine, but problems will start to arise when using cabal-install to install new libraries, especially ones with lots of dependencies. (Recent model B boards have 512 MB on board [1], Raspberry Pi 2 Model B boards have 1GB on board.)

Potential solutions to this problem have been suggested, including using QEMU on a more powerful system and thus compiling your application there and copying the resulting binary across to your Raspberry Pi

Books

• Heitz, Ryan Hello Raspberry Pi!. Manning Publications (2015). p.p. 225. ISBN 9781617292453

See also

• Arduino

• Robotics

• ARM

• iPhone