We've just released Ultibo core 2.0 and the major new feature is full support for the VideoCore IV GPU in all models of the Raspberry Pi, that means Ultibo can now take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics including OpenGL ES for 3D, OpenVG for 2D, OpenMAX IL for multimedia audio and video as well as the Broadcom specific Multimedia Abstraction Layer (MMAL) which gives full access to the official Raspberry Pi camera.
The new Ultibo core 2.0 installer is now available for download from
https://ultibo.org and includes more than 20 new examples showing what can be done with all the new features, if you're just curious and want a very quick look we've posted a couple of 30 second videos on our
Facebook and
Twitter pages so you can see the results. Or if you have a Raspberry Pi we've also made one of the OpenGL ES examples available to
download as a zip file so you can just extract it to an SD card and see for yourself.
This is the first time we know of that full hardware accelerated graphics has been made available on an embedded platform without the overhead of a full operating system, now you can create complex 2D or 3D applications that require as litte as 2MB of disk and boot in just a few seconds.
Of course all of the existing features are still available as well so you can access the full power of all 4 CPUs on Raspberry Pi 2 and 3, interface easily with I2C and SPI devices, communicate over serial devices, create network connections using TCP and UDP and read or write files on FAT, NTFS and CDFS filesystems. All from the familiar Lazarus interface and with a complete Free Pascal RTL that includes classes, exceptions, memory management, threading and much more.
For those who haven't heard, Ultibo is a unikernel development platform written 100% in Free Pascal and released under the same modified LGPL license as the FPC and Lazarus run time libraries. It includes a huge range of features which are constantly expanding and improving, things like pre-emptive threading, multicore support, USB, MMC/SD as well as most of the built in peripherals like UART, I2C and SPI. Right now the focus is on the Raspberry Pi but support is also included for the QEMU emulator and more platforms are planned for the future.
You can find more information and the Windows installer download on the Ultibo
website, the
wiki contains lots of information including how to build the source for various Linux distributions or if you have questions please feel free to ask at our
forum.
Thanks,