Raspberry Pi on Manuel Bernhardt

Fearless concurrency with Rust, cats, and a few Raspberry PIs

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:58:12 +0100

Somehow I’m never satisfied when a program only runs on one computer. The reassuring feeling of connectedness, the thrill of discovering who else is there on the network, the fear of network instability and the insanity of trying to establish a coherent view of the world on multiple machines are both a source of joy and despair that keep me hooked. But I digress…

In the previous article, we looked at building a blinking Raspberry PI with Rust to help cat owners think about cleaning the cat litter box (and avoid death stares from their feline companions). In this article, we’ll take things a step further and expand the Reminder PIs to a network, allowing to spread them all over the house so that forgetting about this daily cat owner duty will become an almost impossible thing to do. In order to achieve this, we will embrace the principles of Fearless Concurrency made possible by Rust’s memory management paradigm. More specifically, we will:

Building a cat litter box reminder with Rust

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 15:34:48 +0100

I continued working on a side-project I built a year ago with Rust, and it is now at a point at which I can write something about it.

When you own cats, you also own a litter box for said cats which needs to be emptied regularly (at least once a day for two adult cats). Failing this, the cats will give you a look which, in human language, means as much as “I will murder you in your sleep” which is not a very pleasant feeling.

Rust Development for the Raspberry Pi on Apple Silicon

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 17:36:39 +0100

Update (18.02.2023): Updated the article to reflect the usage of VSCode remote development instead of JetBrains Gateway

A few weeks ago I started building a Rust project for the Raspberry PI using my brand new MacBook Pro with an M1 chip (the old MacBook Pro from late 2013 still works but it simply is too slow for the work I’m doing these days).

Shiny new MacBook Pro complete with scuba-diving sticker from my wife

Akka Raspberry PI demos

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 15:57:21 +0200

Here are a few demonstrations of how Akka Cluster works internally using a Raspberry PI cluster stack.

Akka Cluster, Java and the Raspberry PI 3 Model B

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 07:39:52 +0200

I recently built an architecture prototype for DIMOCO aiming at answering roughly the following questions:

what does it entail to run an Akka cluster, how fast can new nodes join, how manageable is such a cluster?
are traditional publish-subscribe message distribution semantics supported (one-to-one, one-to-N, one-to-any-of-N)?
how can message loss be averted / minimized?
how fast is the message sending, is it fast enough?
does it feel “Java-like” enough (since Akka has strong ties to Scala and the aim is to use Java for this project)?
how well does it run on the data centers on premise, how easy is it to operate?

Since I’ve been itching to find an excuse for trying out the new Raspberry PI 3 Model B this was the perfect opportunity to order 3 of them and use them for testing the prototype.