Introduction to Pi4J (Java on Raspberry Pi)

Java is not only the server language running on heavy machines! You can do amazing stuff with it on a small single-board computer and gain new knowledge simultaneously, like controlling electronic components and different communication protocols.

A Raspberry Pi is a complete Linux PC with a small form factor with a low price. And, of course, you can run Java on it. The same kind of JVM applications you know, love, and use on heavy machines can also be used on the Raspberry Pi. "Write once, run everywhere"? Ah yes, that's Java's promise! But this small board has some additional possibilities you will not find on that fancy server you are running somewhere in the cloud. All Raspberry Pis have those 40 magical pins to connect unlimited electronic components. Measuring temperatures and distances, toggling LEDs and relays, controlling the content on an LED matrix or LCD display, playing the Star Wars tune on a buzzer... the only limit is your imagination!

In this talk, we'll look at the current state of Pi4J (www.pi4j.com) and dive into the code of a few examples. We'll experiment with Java on a CrowPi - a Raspberry Pi-based laptop to interact with electronic components. Let's also add Spring Boot and Vaadin into the mix to build a web interface to expose the data of those components. And while we're doing all this, we will learn how to reduce the total energy and ecological cost of our data transfers by making better use of bits and bytes.

Speaker
Frank Delporte is a Java Champion, developer, and technical writer working at Azul (https://www.azul.com,]https://www.azul.com), blogs on his site (https://webtechie.be) and Foojay (https://foojay.io/), author of "Getting Started with Java on the Raspberry Pi" (https://webtechie.be/books/), co-organizer of BeJUG (https://bejug.github.io/), and contributor to Pi4J (https://pi4j.com/). He blogs about his experiments with Java, sometimes combined with electronic components, on the Raspberry Pi.

Schedule:
11:30AM-12:00PM EST Networking
12:00PM-1:00PM EST Presentation with Q&A