Introduction

The Circle project provides a C++ bare metal environment for the Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBC). This is a framework for developing applications, which run on the bare hardware, without using an operating system, which is somewhat equivalent to programming a very powerful micro-controller. Frequent areas of application for the bare metal system model are:

  • High-speed data acquisition (DAQ)

  • Retro computer emulation with accurate timing

  • Low latency, high performance audio processing

Characteristics of bare metal solutions can be:

  • Low interrupt latency

  • Full system control 1

  • Light-weighted software architecture 2

  • Direct hardware access 3

  • Quick system start (boot)

  • Can power off the system at any time 4

This documentation provides the necessary information for developing bare metal applications using Circle.

Footnotes

1

Secondary CPU cores can be dedicated to a specific task.

2

Common operating systems work with many software layers instead.

3

Do not need to write a device driver to access hardware interfaces.

4

While the green Activity LED is off.