Thanks so much for attending my talk! (If you haven't seen it yet, it's available on-demand here.) I hope you found it informative and enjoyable. I've gathered all the information I could think of to help you get started with .NET Core on Raspberry Pi.
The demos were performed on a Raspberry Pi 3 B. As far as I'm aware, they should run on any model, but I can't definitively say so. They will certainly run on Raspberry Pi 3 B+, which is an incremental revision that adds PoE (power over ethernet) support. PoE can be really useful for home automation projects.
The Pi itself will require, at a minimum, power and a micro SD card. The official power supply is 2100 mA, so aim for that or higher. (Any 5V micro USB power supply technically works, but I have seen them complain about low power with a 5V 1500 mA power supply.) There are many different introductory kits that include the power supply, micro SD card, and various accessories by different manufacturers. I can't speak for all of them, but I do have personal experience with CanaKit and have been impressed with their packages.
Cases are optional. If you have access to a 3D printer, you can always make your own. My favorite designs are this one and this one (I customized the second one).
Heat sinks are optional. The Pi does a pretty good job with its own thermal throttling, and it's debatable whether a tiny stick-on heat sink without any thermal paste actually reduces the temperature by any significant amount.
There are a ton of accessories available on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, etc. The accessories I used for my talk are:
- Freenove Ultimate Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi - This is a complete kit and has everything you need to get started (and then some!) except for the two items listed below.
- 2 Channel 5V Relays - There are a wide variety of brands on this, but they all seem to be about the same.
- Wired Door Sensor Magnetic Switch
For purposes of having my circuits pre-assembled for the talk, I also used extra breadboards and GPIO breakouts.
You'll need an operating system. I use Raspbian Lite.
You can refer to the slides to see how the circuits were assembled. For your convenience, I've also included the Fritzing diagrams in the Schematics folder.
All the dependencies should restore from NuGet.
Open .\Demos\have-your-pi.sln in Visual Studio and build.
To build the Self-Contained Deployment (SCD), including all the dependencies, you can to run dotnet publish -r linux-arm or you can create a publish profile in Visual Studio and manually change the RuntimeIdentifier element.
From .\Demos, run:
dotnet restore
dotnet build
dotnet publish -r linux-armUsing FileZilla, SCP, or your favorite file transfer tool, move the contents of .\Demos\<demo>\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1\linux-arm\publish to a location on your Pi. Execute chmod 755 on the executable to give it run permissions. You can then run the executable by name, including the path. For example, assuming you are in your home (~) location and you've deployed the pushy-button demo to ~/pushy-button/, you'd type:
./pushy-button/pushy-buttonIMPORTANT - On subsequent builds in Visual Studio or at the command line, the contents of the
publishfolder will not be updated unless you publish again via Visual Studio ordotnet publish. After making changes and compiling, the latest DLL and PDB will be located in.\Demos\<demo>\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1. Those are all you really need to deploy to test/debug changes.
Visual Studio can connect directly to a SCD via SSH. To do so, click Debug > Attach to Process.... In the dialog, for Connection type choose SSH, and then for Connection target enter <username>@<address>. For example, to connect to the device at 192.168.1.101 using the user pi, enter [email protected]. After authenticating, the list of processes will be populated and you can attach to the process.
Debugging from Visual Studio Code depends on vsdbg on the target machine and requires some configuration in VSCode. See this walkthrough for details.
Official GPIO package
Official Device Bindings package
Windows IOT Core will also run .NET Core if you'd prefer a Windows OS, ,but the deployment model is a little different. You'll also find that CamTheGeek.GpioDotNet doesn't work, because it wraps a feature of the Raspian OS. If you're looking to do GPIO on Windows IoT Core, I think System.Devices.Gpio should work, but you might also consider Bifrost.Devices.Gpio. If .NET Core is not a requirement, you can write your app using UWP and Windows.Devices.Gpio.