I've just started on my Raspberry Pi journey - looking to control some physical electronic devices.
I plumped for the 3 B as it looks like it will have ample compute power to do any required bit-banging while not consuming a lot of power. My needs will be modest so my intention is to go with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Lite, perhaps with a custom build.
I am retired after more than 50 years of working in IT so I have plenty of general knowledge about computers and microcontrollers but unfortunately it is mostly in other parts of the IT universe so I'm not up to speed on the details of building a Linux kernel etc. I do know how VMs work and I have plenty of coding and scripting skills.
I had assumed I could just get hold of a distribution ISO that would include one of the popular Linux distributions complete with the build tree for the currently released Raspberry Pi OS and all of the required toolchain to build my RPi boot image - install it on a spare laptop or desktop (or VM) and immediately start cross-compiling by typing make and then when that is working smoothly move on to understand how I can modify the standard code and configs to suit my specific purposes.
I've looked around and could not immediately see what I wanted but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, maybe using the wrong keywords, or, maybe, such a thing simply does not exist.
Can someone please give me shove in the right direction - either to find what I described above or to provide a link to the way this is done in the Pi-verse.
Cheers!
I plumped for the 3 B as it looks like it will have ample compute power to do any required bit-banging while not consuming a lot of power. My needs will be modest so my intention is to go with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Lite, perhaps with a custom build.
I am retired after more than 50 years of working in IT so I have plenty of general knowledge about computers and microcontrollers but unfortunately it is mostly in other parts of the IT universe so I'm not up to speed on the details of building a Linux kernel etc. I do know how VMs work and I have plenty of coding and scripting skills.
I had assumed I could just get hold of a distribution ISO that would include one of the popular Linux distributions complete with the build tree for the currently released Raspberry Pi OS and all of the required toolchain to build my RPi boot image - install it on a spare laptop or desktop (or VM) and immediately start cross-compiling by typing make and then when that is working smoothly move on to understand how I can modify the standard code and configs to suit my specific purposes.
I've looked around and could not immediately see what I wanted but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, maybe using the wrong keywords, or, maybe, such a thing simply does not exist.
Can someone please give me shove in the right direction - either to find what I described above or to provide a link to the way this is done in the Pi-verse.
Cheers!
Statistics: Posted by JustIntonation — Thu Nov 13, 2025 4:23 am