MicroPython in piCore Linux

[bmarkus]

piCore is a Raspberry Pi port of TC (Tiny Core Linux). TC is a Linux toolkit to build custom system. It is cca. 10 Mbyte and runs in RAM. There are no traditional installation, extensions (packages) are squash compressed read-only archives of files added to file system during startup. It requires processing of many lists, dependencies, ... Currently all is written in shell, awk and all other shall magic. While it works perfectly, code hard to read, maintain and shall lacks modern data structures.

I added MicroPython to the new version, piCore 7.0 in alpha test phase and rewrote the startup extension loader and mounter in MicroPython. Now code is much cleaner and startup time is only 60% of the original using only one CPU core.

Additional to MicroPython executable libffi, os module added together with a TC/RPi specific local module. Size increase is relative big in TC terms, but it pays back.

According to user tests MicroPython works fine for GPIO manipulation on the RPi providing faster port manipulation than shell or cPython.

So I decided to keep MicroPython in the final version of piCore 7.0 and use it more cases.

Conclusion you can consider MicroPython not only in various boards as the 'Operating System' but in Linux as a fast, low resource footprint generic scripting language also.

For more info on TC see http://tinycorelinux.net

[dhylands]

Nice. This will definitely be on my list of things to look at.

[phsdv]

Very interesting. One question, will piCore with micro python support GPIO directly, like the RPi.GPIO module: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/RPi.GPIO?

[bmarkus]

It was tested using the /sys/class/gpio interface, see discussion at

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.ph ... 778.0.html

It is easy to make an RPi GPIO module in MicroPython however it is not done yet. This tutorial may help:

https://sites.google.com/site/semillero ... rials/gpio