Why Oracle Engineers Love Raspberry Pi Projects

In a computing universe dominated by hyperscale data centers and cloud-based applications, why do engineers and coders love hobby computers like the $35 Raspberry Pi so much?

It’s the “easy connection between the computer and the physical world,” says Jasper Potts. An IoT interface architect and JavaFX developer at Oracle, Potts has built half a dozen Raspberry Pi-powered contraptions, including a photography ring that makes Matrix-style images, a Steampunk chocolate candy factory, and a personalized manufacturing line that uses augmented reality digital twin asset monitoring.

“The Raspberry Pi is special as it opens embedded computing to a wide audience that would not normally have a chance to build things with these systems,” he says.

Potts’ biggest effort using Raspberry Pi was a supercomputer project led by Oracle Experience Engineer Chris Bensen and unveiled at Oracle Code One 2019. Bristling with blue cables and 3D-printed custom racks, that phonebooth-size device used more than 1,024 Raspberry Pis running Oracle Linux and Java. Bensen will display a smaller version running 84 Raspberry Pi that are searching for aliens via the SETI@home project during Oracle OpenWorld Europe this week. Bensen’s blog offers his insights from building the clusters.

The Java-Pi Connection

At seven years old, the Raspberry Pi has become the third most popular computer of all time, recently crossing the threshold of 30 million units sold. The latest model (Raspberry Pi 4) is essentially a desktop computer, with 1.5GHz ARM CPU, up to 4GB RAM, USB 3.0, and full Gigabit Ethernet.

The 1,024-Pi Cluster running Oracle Linux is just the latest in a long line of projects Oracle engineers have done with the Raspberry Pi, starting with bringing Java to the platform in 2013. Oracle is continuing its legacy of bringing enterprise-grade technology to the masses with Oracle Linux 7 for the ARM architecture, specifically for use with the Raspberry Pi 3.

“One of our goals for the cluster was to have off-the-shelf hardware that anyone could buy,” Bensen says. “With Oracle Linux for ARM, your average hobbyist is able to run a lot of our software locally for their own personal IoT projects like robots or prosthetic arms.” 

Oracle’s Java engineers have been intrigued by the Raspberry Pi since its inception, and Potts was there to see firsthand its impact on the Java team.

“It allowed us to open the embedded Java world that we were so passionate about to a much wider audience,” he says. “We worked hard with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver Java for free on every Pi, so the whole Java ecosystem would be available to people learning and building things.”

One underrated thing Raspberry Pi did for embedded computing, Potts says, was “provide an operating system that is stable and maintained over a long period of time.” Prior to the Pi, embedded boards were designed for one-off prototyping and had a months-long life span before they became obsolete. “That meant an ecosystem could never be built for them, and no one could write books about them or create a teaching curriculum about them,” he says. “If you wanted to use one at home to automate your lights or sprinklers you would have to accept that you might have to replace it after a few years and start again.”

Looking for inspiration? You could attend Oracle OpenWorld Europe to connect with like-minded business developers and engineers, or read on for other ways people have combined Oracle technology with a Raspberry Pi computer to, as Potts puts it, connect the computer and the physical world.

Automate the Barn

You think you want a place in the country? Well, animal care ain’t that easy, as Todd Sharp, a full stack developer and an Oracle Developer Advocate, discovered. He lives with his family on a Georgia farm, and once he realized how early chickens wake up every single morning, he started automating his barn using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, and Oracle Cloud.

Connecting the technology to various pumps and sensors meant he could “automate tasks like filling a water bowl, opening and closing doors, and monitoring the environment,” Sharp says. It all interfaces with cloud resources for storage and messaging.

Track Beehive Health

Since October 2018, UK-based specialists from Oracle’s cloud innovation team have helped World Bee Project founder Sabiha Malik develop a model for a network of remotely monitored hives. The team used Raspberry Pi to prototype hive sensors that detect humidity, temperature, and weight of the hive, as well as how it sounds—one of the most important metrics of hive health. These connect to Oracle Cloud to provide a scalable, global, honey bee health tracking system.

Build a Self-Driving Car

A Raspberry Pi computer and camera are the brains of this toy-size autonomous vehicle, which is programmed via Java and Micronaut, with autopilot using the machine learning libraries of Tensorflow/Keras Donkeycar. Micronaut, from Oracle Groundbreaker Award winner Graeme Rocher, is a Java virtual machine-based framework for microservice and serverless applications—and it runs handily on small-memory footprint devices such as Raspberry Pi. Inside the car’s Micronaut application, the Robo4J robotics and IoT Java library manages throttle and steering.

Model a Smart City

Oracle engineer Gabriele Provinciali, a native of Rome, has “dreamt about how we could transform Rome.” So he built Proxima City, a LEGO-brick metropolis providing garbage collection, smart lighting, optimized parking and more via sensors, Raspberry Pis, and Oracle Cloud. The Proxima City software development kit has been replicated by teams in a dozen cities, showing how Oracle Cloud services for IoT, machine learning, and digital experience could help fix life’s little annoyances. “Everything we implement is what we would like to see in Rome,” Provinciali says.

Race Track Counter

This final one isn’t technically a Raspberry Pi project, but it explains the timeless interest technologists have in tinkering.

“I was lucky to grow up in the UK where we had BBC computers—the Raspberry Pi of my day,” Potts says. When he was 15, he used one with light sensors under a Scalextric slot car track to measure lap times and speeds of the toy race cars. “The Raspberry Pi was developed by a group of guys who grew up like I did with the BBC and wanted to create something similar for the next generations.”

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