Rasperry Pi

Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV/Monitor and a keyboard. (see FAQ)

octave on Raspbian

The recommended OS is Raspbian “wheezy” and there are ready to use octave packages for that. You can check the available version with "apt-cache policy". As of 9.Jan 2013 this was:

$ apt-cache policy octave
octave:
 Installed: (none)
 Candidate: 3.6.2-5
 Version table:
    3.6.2-5 0
       500 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages

Installing octave is really easy:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install octave

This will take some time to download (approx. 29MB) and install octave and all of its needed dependencies. After this there is an entry "Programming" - "GNU Octave" in your LXDE menu.

octave-forge packages on Raspbian

If you type

$ apt-cache search octave-

you will see a lot of additional octave forge packages, for example

octave-control - control functions for Octave from Octave-Forge

Just install it with apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get install octave-control

build your own .oct files

sudo apt-get install liboctave-dev

After that you can compile your programs using "mkoctfile". See GNU octave manual: A.1 Oct-Files for how to write them.

Further work

• Write a simple example which read/writes the GPIO ports from within octave. Perhaps a simple oct wrapper around http://www.open.com.au/mikem/bcm2835/ ?