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Have Your Pi and Eat It Too: .NET Core on Raspberry Pi

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.

Get the hardware

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.

Get some accessories

There are a ton of accessories available on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, etc. The accessories I used for my talk are:

For purposes of having my circuits pre-assembled for the talk, I also used extra breadboards and GPIO breakouts.

Get the bits

You'll need an operating system. I use Raspbian Lite.

Build the demos

Circuits

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.

Dependencies

All the dependencies should restore from NuGet.

Visual Studio

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.

Command Line

From .\Demos, run:

dotnet restore
dotnet build
dotnet publish -r linux-arm

Deploy and run the demos

Using 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-button

IMPORTANT - On subsequent builds in Visual Studio or at the command line, the contents of the publish folder will not be updated unless you publish again via Visual Studio or dotnet 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.

Debugging on the Pi

Visual Studio

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 pi@192.168.1.101. After authenticating, the list of processes will be populated and you can attach to the process.

Visual Studio Code

Debugging from Visual Studio Code depends on vsdbg on the target machine and requires some configuration in VSCode. See this walkthrough for details.

.NET Core IoT Libraries

Official GPIO package
Official Device Bindings package

Windows on Raspberry Pi

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.

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