Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/08/10/hello-windows-10-iot-core/

by vyrotek • 11 years ago

234 166 11 years ago

blogs.windows.com

tigeba2• 11 years ago

When they released this a couple of months ago I was pretty excited to try it out. I think the barrier to installation is a bit high. First install Windows 10, then custom install of VS, install IoT Templates, then about 30 more steps before you get the image to flash on your SD. How about a link to the image I can blast on the SD and kick the tires without a couple hours of downloading and installing prerequisites?

ghurlman• 11 years ago

While the tool to flash the SD that Microsoft built requires Windows 10, it doesn't require anything else besides a Pi: http://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/SetupRPI.htm

Granted, if you go through the developer site, it points you towards installing what you need to develop software for it. shrug

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

There are dozens of other tools available to do the same thing, and yet they had to go build their own?

free652• 11 years ago

A PC running Windows 10 (Prepared in the previous step)

That requirement itself is a big step:

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/SetupPCRPI.htm

jsingleton6• 11 years ago

You can use this python script to convert the image to standard raw format: https://github.com/t0x0/random

Then flash it with your normal tool such as dd or Win32DiskImager.

lawl3• 11 years ago

Quickly made an unpacker script in bash, couldn't test it yet, but it looks like it works. You'll need 7zip and a working installation of python,

https://github.com/lawl/Win10IOTRaspberryUnpacker

Yuioup• 11 years ago

I asked the very same question and got downvoted for it.

rsync• 11 years ago

Do not discuss your own downvotes.

Do not interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

kozukumi• 11 years ago

Yeah I was excited to try it out but I can't spend a whole day on getting things working at the moment, just too damn busy. I was hoping I would get an iso I can dd onto an SD card pop it in the RPi and it boot up and give me an IP address to connect and deploy an app to in a few clicks. You know like how I can do with Linux.

Still it is a step in the right direction for Microsoft. I am happy to see them doing such things. Competition in the IoT space is a good thing for all.

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

Agreed. There is absolutely no excuse for having all that crap to go through.

eplanit• 11 years ago

There is absolutely no excuse for having all that crap to go through.

I agree, too -- and this phrase has been on the minds of people while installing Microsoft products for decades now. It's in their DNA somehow, it seems.

blacksmith_tb• 11 years ago

Maybe some selfless individual can slog through it all, and then use dd to make an image and post it somewhere (which I am sure violates thousands of pages of EULAs, but would be much more in keeping with how Raspbian etc. are distributed).

teekert4• 11 years ago

Very funny considering the uneasiness people have towards "putting Linux on a computer". For the Raspberry Pi, the reality is completely reversed as NOOBS is the absolute easiest, most convenient way to put any OS on any computer ever.

I really don't understand people who want this, with closed source software the learning stops at some point, you can't learn everything about your Windows-Pi even though it was created for learning! Even the example code (read I2C temp sensor, display using webserver) they give on the home page starts with: "// Copyright (c) Microsoft. All rights reserved.". Why would you want this? Can there really be people that are willing and able to build their own IOT but do not want to learn about Linux?

nbadg3• 11 years ago

Can there really be people that are willing and able to build their own IOT but do not want to learn about Linux?

Absolutely, and especially in corporate environments. I'm not saying Windows 10 IoT is any better (I think it's very unlikely to be, but I also haven't evaluated it), but I can say for certain that I wish I had a single, identical python library for any IoT platform that handled interfaces as simply as:

    with pin_1 as p1:
        p1.output(1)
        time.sleep(2)
        p1.output(0)

Now, there are some libraries that approach that level of simplicity once you have your system configuration set up, but that doesn't lend itself to agile development. I want something that works like that out-of-box -- flash it, load code, press go button -- which simply doesn't exist. And, after spending a lot of time writing my own hardware IO library using direct memory access in Python, I don't think there's an OS out there that's capable of doing it (yet). I've spent just way too much time accommodating unfortunate abstractions taken at the linux kernel level (that I understand for historical reasons, but disagree with for future ones). An operating system for IoT done right is, in my opinion, a very lightweight exokernel with some really smart abstractions that just gets out of your way. Then you need a clever (and native) secure networking system, and you're in very good shape.

Nexxxeh• 11 years ago

Why would you want this? Can there really be people that are willing and able to build their own IOT but do not want to learn about Linux?

Knowing about Linux doesn't mean assuming it's the best tool for the job at hand.

I've used Linux, I've installed Linux, I've fixed a couple of broken Linux installs etc. I've compiled software on Linux. I've imaged an SD card for a Pi from Windows pre-Noobs. I've installed Rasbian using NOOBS.

I've also played with Arduinos, although mainly using other peoples' libraries for time and network comms etc.

I have not, however, written any serious software for Linux and I am not a Linux developer. I mostly use VS on Windows to develop software that will end up on Windows computers to be used by Windows users.

I have the required physical equipment, software and skillset to make a solution that meets the end requirements using 10 Core on a Pi 2. I don't have that for Rasbian. I've no doubt Lady Ada has a tutorial somewhere to teach me enough to get it working, but why would I invest my time in that?

I'd be better off using the skills I already have to accomplish this task. Then learning something completely different that will allow me to accomplish an end result I can't presently achieve.

slowmovintarget• 11 years ago

I read the headline, considered it for a few moments, and the only response I could come up with was "No."

Why would I put an OS on a computationally constrained device that is essentially guaranteed to spend a portion of the CPU time doing things I likely don't want done, for someone else (Microsoft in this case)?

throwawaykf052• 11 years ago

I've spent a decade and a half developing software for and deploying software to Linux, but never had to look at the code. Funnily enough, that's the same number of times I've had to look at the code for Windows and OSX, which I've been using for a comparable amount of time.

yareally• 11 years ago

Having worked in both Linux and Windows shops, yes, there are people that would readily use Windows on a π, because that's what they know best. Could they use Linux? Yeah, probably, they're smart people. However, that's a bunch of extra steps when you really just want to get things working and hack around on some code.

At some point they might get curious and try Linux on it as well, but I'm all for whatever makes it easier for someone to get into trying something new without a lot of burden. For some people that means using Windows so they can use the platform and tooling they're most familiar with (Visual Studio and .net).

Yes, there's mono and such, but even that still brings its own complexity when you actually consider what else it takes to get set up and going for someone that's never used Linux before (or outside of some courses in college).

It's like wanting to build furniture, but then told you should plant a tree, wait for that tree to grow, chop it down, cut it up for wood, then you can start building some furniture. Most people would give up long before actually making any furniture in that case.

jsingleton6• 11 years ago

I tried the technical preview of IoT core and was underwhelmed. The mouse didn't even work! It jumped around erratically making it unusable.

My experience with Linux on the Pi is that it just works out of the box. Simple things that you need to install a driver for on Windows are plug and play on Linux [0].

I installed the desktop Windows 10 preview just to flash the SD card. Although I read in the Mag Pi [1] that there is a Python script [2] to convert the image to a normal format.

I'm a big fan of C# and I'm a professional .NET developer. It's my go to stack. Yet, I believe that the best way to use a Raspberry Pi is with Python on Linux.

[0] https://unop.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-electricity-monitor

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/34/

[2] https://github.com/t0x0/random

bborud• 11 years ago

Business as usual for Microsoft.

There must be something about their business model I'm not getting. Going to microsoft.com with the intent of buying Windows to install it on a naked PC or in a VM on OSX, I have yet to identify an option that allows me to: 1) buy a license, 2) download an ISO image.

The closest solution I've seen is to download some exe file that presupposes that I have Windows installed somewhere so I can....do god knows what to get an install going.

I know what I came to the site for. Instead the site spends all its energy on selling me on the idea of Windows and then fails to sell me the product.

Consistently.

For years.

Why? Do they not want my business? Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?

This is neither hyperbole nor gratuitous negativism, but Microsoft is perhaps the worst company to buy a product from online. Microsoft fixing this is the litmus test for when they might, and I would like to emphasize might, be able to stop sucking.

christoph• 11 years ago

I suffered this with a 2nd hand Windows 7 computer my mother was using that kept complaining about being counterfeit.

Windows is only £80 or so and there was a big button on the nag screens that took me to the Windows site to buy a licence. Great - credit card in hand I clicked on through and was instantly greeted with buy Windows 8.1 screens.

The problem is, I absolutely did not want under any circumstances to install 8.1. I just wanted a legit licence to the already installed 7, which the computer was quite happily running and required no learning/explaining of metro to my mother.

For nearly 1 hour I tried to find a way to buy that Windows 7 licence key and found absolutely no way to do it.

nadams2• 11 years ago

The closest solution I've seen is to download some exe file that presupposes that I have Windows installed somewhere so I can...

My guess they did that because it's probably just like BartPE or other PE products - it copies files from the underlying OS.

Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?

There is nothing stopping you from running Windows in a VM - millions of people do it all over the world.

Kurtz79• 11 years ago

"Why? Do they not want my business? Is it really so horrible to sell their product to someone who wants to run their OS under VMWare?"

Not really, they want the business of IT departments of medium/large companies, running full Windows stacks (Windows Enterprise, Office, Windows Server, MS Sql Server, Exchange), which buy licenses by the dozen (at least) through their purchasing department.

It's how they make(a lot of) money.

MarkSweep• 11 years ago

The is a link in the top right hand corner to the Microsoft Store, where you can buy Windows. When I bought Win7, I could download an ISO.

voltagex_2• 11 years ago

https://github.com/t0x0/random/wiki/ffu2img

tigeba2• 11 years ago

Most excellent.

rcarmo3• 11 years ago

I'm curious as to the mention of a "Web Control" and how long we have to wait until we can use DirectX for graphics, seeing as I've been trying to use Pis for digital signage[1] for a while with varying results (we've since started using cheap Android boxes with great results, but I wish I had more choices).

[1] https://github.com/sapo/digital-signage-client

thenewwazoo3• 11 years ago

I had to recently roll my own signage solution and have built something I think is pretty compelling using Yocto[1]. I'm using CuBox-i devices running Linux and Midori (which is based on WebKit). I don't know if it does accelerated rendering but the boxes are much more powerful than Pis (and are a lot less dev-kit-y than Pis). If nothing else, hopefully a pointer to Yocto will be useful to you - it's pretty great.

[1] https://github.com/luciddg/kiosk-yocto

rcarmo3• 11 years ago

Thanks, I'll look into it. Right now the Android boxes we're using cost €50 (less if you buy in bulk) and do both accelerated rendering and HLS video, but I'm always looking out for more options.

tomardern• 11 years ago

What Android digital signage client are you using?

rcarmo3• 11 years ago

This one: https://github.com/sapo/android-signage-client

(of course we rolled our own :))

typon• 11 years ago

Does it come with the same privacy issues as its older sister?

cptskippy• 11 years ago

It requires you to install Windows 10 on your Desktop so... yes.

jchrisa• 11 years ago

I'm in the middle of writing my first C# app, targeting the Intel IoT Gateway (all with MonoDevelop on Ubuntu.) How things come full circle...

joezydeco5• 11 years ago

A robotic hockey table doesn't seem very IoT to me.

I'm a little confused as to what Windows brings to the table for embedded devices at this point, especially screenless ones.

tacos5• 11 years ago

Tools.

doomspork2• 11 years ago

I can't tell if you're making a joke or not.

WorldWideWayne2• 11 years ago

Microsoft just came out with an Android Emulator this year too. It's faster than any other emulator that I've seen and it's really well integrated with Visual Studio.

If you've never really used Microsofts tools before and all that you've heard about Microsoft has originated from the crowd that hangs out at HN, you can be forgiven for not knowing that they make very fine quality tools.

dr_zoidberg• 11 years ago

Indeed, their developer tools are some of the best, though the do tend to try locking you in their environment.

joezydeco5• 11 years ago

I've managed a 25-year career out of staying away from anything Microsoft in the embedded arena. WinCE, WinCE Auto, Windows Embedded, Windows XP Embedded, Windows XP Embedded Cool Ranch Flavor, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows whatever-the-hell-it-is-today. And that philosophy has saved me a lot of pain over the years.

The tools might be great, but I don't ship tools. I ship applications that need good solid runtime libraries.

Win10 might be a fresh start and that's all well-and-good. But I'll believe it when I see it. Slapping on a buzzword like "IoT" won't change things. I develop lots of IoT stuff and I see no reason to go near Win10.

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

But VS isn't used for writing Android apps. The vast majority of those are written in Java, which VS isn't used for.

BuildTheRobots• 11 years ago

Bear in mind it seems to only emulate x86 targets -and the standard Android emulator seems pretty quick when it's not having to pretend to be an ARM chip...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/11/12/i...

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emu...

andycross2• 11 years ago

Check out netmf

lhaussknecht• 11 years ago

Sad that they showed a node example. What about asp.net on .net core?

serichsen• 11 years ago

Yeah! Or COBOL! PHP! INTERCAL!

tychuz• 11 years ago

ASP.NET is not oldschool - it has MVC (with best templating language - Razor), real time with SignalR. Stop living in Visual Basic and Web Forms age...

doomspork2• 11 years ago

Next on the list of bad IoT ideas, we port Flash to the Raspberry Pi.

tankenmate2• 11 years ago

In fact there is already a Pepper plugin for Flash that works on RPi2; you can get it from an ARMv7 version of ChromeOS.

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

Or even worse, use Flash for a car instrument cluster. Oh wait, that's already been done: https://www.adobe.com/inspire-archive/june2010/articles/arti...

(used by a lot of Ford cars)

escobar• 11 years ago

There's a heading that reads:

Developers, Developers, Developers

I've always cracked up whenever I see Ballmer's developers video, so I was pretty happy that Microsoft's IoT team has a sense of humor and was able to get that approved (if they had to)

reference if you haven't seen the original Ballmer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

_lce0• 11 years ago

the guy is hilarious at the stage: https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=12s

meburns• 11 years ago

Yes! This made me so happy when I got to that section :)

jbb555• 11 years ago

Does this run win32 applications?

cube00• 11 years ago

No, but it will run apps that use a subset of the API for universal apps (ie. the app must be able to handle some parts of the API missing) https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/dn726767.asp...

intrasight• 11 years ago

I just don't get why they would put up a barrier to entry by requiring Windows 10 - at least I can't think of any technical rationale.

ultramancool8• 11 years ago

Well, you can always patch the check out and find out what happens.

elchief• 11 years ago

probably for the same reason that Apple requires you to own a mac to build an iPhone app

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Except that OS X and iOS are both Apple environments for Apple hardware, while the Pi is an independent hardware product.

So no - there is no good reason for making Win 10 essential, beyond corporate dementia.

Seriously. Why on Earth does MS seem to think there's going to be a stampede to install an OS that doesn't do anything outstandingly special, has a high cost of entry (in time and effort, if you don't want Win 10) and is already competing with a good few established contenders?

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

That's not the same at all. This is literally just putting an image on an SD card.

mtgx• 11 years ago

Supporting a proprietary platform on Raspberry Pi kind of defeats the point of the openness on which Raspberry Pi was built, no?

elsjaako2• 11 years ago

I don't see how you can practically have an open platform and then close it off to proprietary things.

jackweirdy• 11 years ago

The commenter isn't saying it should be blocked, they're saying it's against the spirit of openness.

joshuapants2• 11 years ago

The Raspberry Pi may be openwashed, but it's not really that open.

edit: oh no, I've run afoul of the Broadcom shills. Oh well.

Jedd• 11 years ago

True assessment or not, it's not a compelling reason in itself to encourage less free use(r)s of it.

farresito• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, there are a few parts of RPi that are closed, like the GPU, if I recall correctly, but I do agree with you that it sort of goes against the philosophy of tinkering that openness brings.

tankenmate2• 11 years ago

There is a reasonable Gallium / Mesa driver for the GPU on the way; for simple OpenGL / OpenCL workloads it works reasonably well. It is being actively worked on so it is still improving.

https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/

makomk• 11 years ago

The GPU is only partially closed. Unfortunately, the part of the GPU that's closed and requires a binary blob is the bit that boots the Pi, so you have to use closed-source code in order to do anything with the Pi at all - even stuff that doesn't use the GPU.

joeyspn• 11 years ago

Sincerely I prefer to run ubuntu. Last week I installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 in my Pi 2 and it works like a charm. Totally recommended...

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi

Ubuntu Snappy Core (also marketed for IoT)... mmm not so much great. IMO still few community and howtos for building your snappy apps (even Raspbian is better)

MrZongle2• 11 years ago

I'd love to try this out.

But I have zero interest in migrating any of my perfectly fine Windows 7 systems to Windows 10. Other than a shiny "FREE!" sticker, I have yet to see a compelling case for me to upgrade.

pen2l2• 11 years ago

Sorry, silly question: can one use this Win10 R-pi as a "real computer"? (more to the point: I want to run labview programs on this r-pi, because of its small size/cost -- give/receive triggers various home automation equipment etc., I'm wondering if that'll be possible with this)

preya2k• 11 years ago

Probably not since there is no GUI and regular Windows command line tools won't run out of the box.

andycross2• 11 years ago

It has a gui. It supports headed and headless modes.

you're right tho, most tools from win32 won't work.

s73v3r6• 11 years ago

No, this will not work as a regular desktop Windows. It's more of an embedded Windows install.

miguelrochefort2• 11 years ago

You can install LabView on it, just not if the OS is Windows 10 IoT.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/LabVIEW-for-Ra...

pen2l2• 11 years ago

Sorry, I must be missing something. I see no mention of a successful Labview install on an R-pi, no matter the operating system. Maybe I missed a thread? I'm okay with any operating system of course, I just want my Labview program to run on it.

MiguelHudnandez• 11 years ago

For anyone wondering what IoT stands for, it's "Internet of Things."

VLM• 11 years ago

License? Seems hard to find online. Not looking for anything unusual for the existing raspi community, just what do I have to do to make a project on it then distribute a bootable sdcard image to users around the world for free. I'm guessing its a total non-starter but if I were surprised by it being BSD/GPL that would be interesting.

The hardware compatibility part of the release notes look like a bad linux install from 1995, which is pretty funny.

jpablo2• 11 years ago

Seeing that they just added Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support I find ironic that Windows has the disadvantage on drivers and Linux has the upper hand.

stillsut• 11 years ago

The AirHockey Demo seems like a complete rip-off of a Spanish maker's product, which he has been promoting: https://github.com/JJulio/AHRobot

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think some credit is due

revelation• 11 years ago

Is the Internet of Things now a Raspberry Pi 2?! A quad-core 900MHz CPU with a whopping 1GiB of RAM and a dedicated GPU?

So, for how long can you run a RPi 2 from a CR2032 cell or an AAA battery? A minute or two on full bore? Because that's the kind of energy budget people are generally talking about when they mean internet of things.

The RPi2 is a fully-featured media center, not a door lock or light switch or power sensor.

I guess the problem for Microsoft with the whole IoT thing is simply that they will never have Windows there, the devices you actually use for IoT measure their RAM in KiB. And, frankly, operating systems are very far down the on list of things we need to make IoT a reality.

williesleg• 11 years ago

Why would anyone want to put such closed-source bloatware licenceware with no future on anything?

It's a trap!

pedalpete• 11 years ago

I've got an Intel Galilleo that Microsoft sent me which I was hoping to use to play with the embedded windows platform, but it was so locked down, all you could do was write arduino sketches, now they release their Windows for IoT and it only works on Raspberry Pi 2?

I've got beaglebones and RPis that I'd love to give Windows 10 a play on, but they've shot themselves in the foot by supporting such a small part of the hardware market.

I've been a microsoft fan for a long time, I have a Windows 10 laptop, Windows Phone, and want to at least give them a try for IoT (though I have no problem with my linux installs), but I think they've lost me on this one.

Who thought they could come into a market which is well served by the linux community, offer very little if anything compared to what is already available, make it difficult to install, have it work on a small subset of hardware, and make it a success.

I don't understand Microsoft's strategy here at all!

dafrankenstein2• 11 years ago

thats awesome!

Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2

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