Pi Day

I’d completely forgotten about Pi day until I saw someone post about it online and I thought I should write about the happy coincidence that I’ve been working with a Raspberry Pi today.

Last week I took delivery of a new Raspberry Pi. I have an older Pi 2 but I wanted to have a newer unit to allow me to develop 32feet.NET for Linux and the Raspberry Pi is a compact and simple device to setup for this purpose. There are still supply issues with the latest models but I was able to get a Raspberry Pi 3A+. The A is a shrunken form factor which is ridiculously small but only has one USB socket. I bought a kit from Pi Hut which included a power supply and case. I invested in the Raspberry Pi keyboard at the same time as this has a built in USB hub so that you can daisy-chain in a mouse and other peripherals. Because it has built in Wi-Fi the only other thing I had to plug in was an HDMI cable to a spare display. The Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 both have a built in Bluetooth adapter and both can run the ARM64 builds of Raspberry Pi OS.

Setting up the microSD card was straight-forward as long as you don’t pick the default Raspberry Pi OS image (which is 32-bit) and get the 64bit one. BlueZ, the official Bluetooth stack for Linux, is already included so the Bluetooth works out of the box. I needed to install the .NET SDK, enable SSH and then I was able to debug remotely from Visual Studio.

The process is not quite as slick as remote debugging an Android or iOS app. You have to build your code, then you need to deploy it to the Pi. To do this I used scp (Secure Copy). There is a process to follow to setup an SSH key and copy it to the Pi so that you don’t have to authenticate with a password to connect via SSH and this applies to scp too. The scp command lets you copy one or more files from the host PC to a directory on the Pi (you’ll want to create a directory on the Pi to run your new app from). You can also download files in the other direction if you need to get data back from the Pi after running the app.

Now you have the app deployed you can use the command line on the Pi to run the app using the dotnet command e.g.

dotnet MyApplication.dll

What I did was start the program off and wait for input, to give me time to connect the debugger then I can continue when ready. It’s just a straight-forward console app.

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
var inputString = Console.ReadLine();

For debugging from Visual Studio you go to Debug > Attach to process… Select SSH as the connection type and enter or find your Raspberry Pi device – the format is the SSH login of user@hostname. When you’ve connected you’ll see a list of processes running on the remote device and you should see one which begins “dotnet”. Click Attach and wait for the debugger to attach, setup breakpoints and load symbols. Once the activity dies down in the Output window you can type any text into the Pi command line and press enter and let the magic begin.

I’ve started by incorporating Linux.Bluetooth (previously known as Plugin.BlueZ) as this wraps most of the required Bluetooth LE functionality from the underlying DBus API. As I delve more into this I’ve had to poke around in DBus itself using Tmds.DBus. There is a useful study guide at the Bluetooth SIG which shows how it all works. Hopefully soon I’ll have the Linux support ready in preview form and it can be tested on other devices. Please get in touch through GitHub if you’d like to help out.

Oh, and coincidence number 2? I’d already planned to make a Pie for dinner tonight before realising the date – Yummy!