I’m working on a tracker system for a customer. Now my C++ isnt that good and my ARM assembler isnt up to somthing quite so heavy (Its not JUST a tracker) so I looked at other platforms to use.

In the end I’ve settled on the Pi, not least because its not a huge stretch to do what I need to to in the basic programming tools available.  I need to open two serial ports, fire up PPPD and then do some rudimentary data processing and split one of the serial ports.

After some fiddling PPPD behaves and the pi can connect to the Internet on its own over GSM. Non trivial but PPPD is an old foe and it was beaten into submission. The hardware was built and tested and the whole thing mounted up on a plate ready for some serious dev work…

During the tinkering I found out that there was a working Pascal compiler, I know Pascal, I know it VERY well and can do a lot with it, then I found the Delphi like IDE, Lazarus. In a few mins I was away. Turns out the repository versions are very old, cue having to download and compile from scratch.

This didnt go entirely well and took 8 hours and many false starts but in the end I got there, more faffing and I have an x86 dev box that actually compiles in under a week.

A fight then ensued to get workign serial port access and I *think* I’ve done that so now I have the unit talking to the GPS already.

Asynchronus TCP… Thats taking longer…

This does open the way to a lot of porting of my apps over to Linux, something I have been wanting to do for a while. It also opens up a serious number of possibilities with Pi and Beaglebone for us. So many projects opened up.