Each year, around the world on the 14th March there are a number of celebrations related to the mathematical constant represented by the Greek symbol Pi, which can be approximated to the value 3.14, hence the chosen date (www.piday.org). In recent years however, the IT industry has also begun to use the day to celebrate the record breaking success of the small, low cost, single board computer known as the Raspberry Pi that is widely used in both education and industry – over 19 million units sold. This year the Raspberry Pi Foundation have chosen International Pi Day to launch their newer, faster “Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+”.
A simple reminder here on International Pi Day 2018, that the leading streaming analytics platform, Apama, is freely available for Raspberry Pi users in the form of the Apama Core Community Edition. This build of Apama is compatible with the ARMv7-hf hardware used in the Raspberry Pi version 2B, 3B, and the new 3B+. One of the expected benefits of the new “Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+” is the much improved networking, which has increased from 100Mbps to 300Mbps, and will help those streaming analytics applications that were previously network IO constrained (rather than CPU constrained) when running on the Pi. Apama can be used on the Pi for all kinds of Streaming Analytics applications, and we even have available community extensions to access the GPIO ports giving direct access to all kinds of connected electronic devices.
This week, in an internal R&D employee Innovation Week event at Software AG that spans over 700 employees and 140+ projects around the world, we have one group of Apama engineers in the Cambridge UK office working to improve our future GPIO plugin capabilities for Apama Community Edition on the Raspberry Pi, and separately around Apama running inside Docker on the Pi – watch out for future blog posts on these subjects in the near future. In the meantime, here is a reminder of our previous Pi related information on this blog that talked about the existing GPIO plugin for Apama to get you started.
So, why not dust off your Raspberry Pi and try out Apama today in your own projects – Download now!
Happy Pi Day!
– Kev
Footnote: The Linux ARM build of Apama Core Community Edition (up to and including version 10.2) is NOT currently compatible the Raspberry Pi versions 1B+, 1A+, Zero, or ZeroW, as all of those use the older and less capable ARMv6 architecture.