Raspberry Pi

This is a hands-on path from a blank SD card to a running Amalgame program that blinks an LED, reads a button, and talks to an I²C sensor on a Raspberry Pi.

Amalgame compiles to native ARM64 code, so a Pi runs the same language you use on your laptop — no cross-compiler, no toolchain gymnastics. You write .am, you amc build, you get a real binary.

🥧 What you need

• A Raspberry Pi (any model, 1 → 5) running a 64-bit OS.
• A few jumper wires, an LED + a 330 Ω resistor, a push-button. The I²C example wants any I²C device (an MPU-6050, a small OLED, a PCF8574 LCD backpack — anything that ACKs on the bus).

The three steps

1. Set up your Pi — flash a 64-bit OS, install amc, enable the I²C/SPI interfaces, and install the libgpiod system dependency. Do this once.
2. Your first program — create a project, add the amalgame-hardware-gpio package, and blink an LED. ~5 minutes.
3. Examples — copy-paste, wire up, run:
   • Blink an LED
   • Read a button (edge events)
   • Scan an I²C sensor bus
   • Drive an LED bar (chase)

Which package?

Everything here uses amalgame-hardware-gpio, the first member of the Amalgame.Hardware family. One package, five peripherals:

It is backed by libgpiod v2 on the GPIO character device (/dev/gpiochip*) — the modern, kernel-blessed interface that works on every Pi, including the Pi 5 (whose GPIO sits behind the RP1 chip, where the old /dev/gpiomem trick no longer works).

The same pin API mirrors the planned Amalgame.Mcu HAL, so the code you write here will later read almost identically on a bare-metal microcontroller. (A How To → MCU section will follow.)

hardware-gpio is the Raspberry Pi backend. On top of it sits a whole family of portable component drivers (LEDs, motors, sensors, displays, …) — see the full Hardware components catalogue.

Start with Set up your Pi.