The University of Cambridge has released a free 12-step online course on building a basic operating system for the Raspberry Pi.
The course, Baking Pi – Operating Systems Development, is aimed at students of 16 and over with some prior programming experience, “although younger readers may still find some of it accessible, particularly with assistance”.
The 12 lessons begin with the theoretical basics of what an operating system is and does, before the practical work begins.
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Students will learn to “enable and manipulate one of the board’s LEDs, then learn some graphics theory and start generating lines, text and random numbers”, according to the Raspberry Pi blog. By the end they will be “manipulating text to display computed values, and learning how to build your own command line interface”.
Every lesson has a question and answer section to track students’ progress.
The course requires access to a Raspberry Pi with an SD card, and a second system running Windows, OS X or Linux with the ability to write to the card. All necessary software is provided for download.
The University of Cambridge has already indicated its approval of the Raspberry Pi by purchasing one for every new Computer Science student starting in 2012. The Fresher’s guide for CS students has its own separate Raspberry Pi section, full of advice on getting started with the device.
The Baking Pi course was compiled by student Alex Chadwick, and is just one of a growing series of tutorials by students working as summer interns at the university.
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