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Running Processing on the Raspberry Pi

Posted on Monday 7 January 2013 | No Comments

Having encountered difficulties installing processing on the raspberry pi it was discovered that the problem was due to the default Java JDK'Sun 6 JDK'  not being able to run on ARM. In order to overcome this an alternative ARM compatible JDK was downloaded and installed.
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk librxtx-java

Processing linux 32 ( in this case 1.5.1) was then downloaded and unzipped.
http://processing.org/download/

This linux verion of Processing assumes a Intel architecture so we need to remove the link to java directory from within the unzipped files. To do this the command rf is used. a side effect of this is that the director will most likely be deleted.  This is described in more detail here. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/50
rm -rf java


The next step is to create a symbolic link between where processing looks for the java directory and open JDK which is where the openjdk is located. A guide to this is shown here. http://help.hardhathosting.com/question.php/95

The following commad was used to create the symbolic link.
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/ ./java

Processing can now be started.

There is a warning message warning about using a different JDK but it should be safe to ignore this. 














The Processing IDE should then start up
The main GUI can then be started
In order to communicate with the Xbee serial communications were required, in order to do this the RXTX libary was to be deleted and replaced with an ARM version.

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk librxtx-java

and run from the directory where processing is stored

$ cp /usr/lib/jni/librxtxSerial.so modes/java/libraries/serial/library/linux32/ 

However problems were encountered with this final stage of serial port communications and processing was not picking up the serial port we needed to communicate with the Xbee.

Due to time constraints and the approaching demonstration date it was decided to put this last stage on hold to be fixed later and it will hopefully be revisited in the future.

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