Hey guys, I'm a little gone. But in this blog post I'm going to summarize what I've been working on and thinking about for the future of my content creation. I hope you like the news.

The TorizonCore is Toradex easy-to-use industrial Linux software platform.

That platform, and its ecosystem, were only available for Toradex hardware, Verdin, Colibri, and Apalis families of computer on modules. But that changed with the Torizon for Raspberry Pi and x86-64 proposal that was published last year in Toradex Labs.

The purpose of this project was to kick-start and release an experimental version of TorizonCore for Raspberry Pi and x86-64 hardware.

And that's where TorizonCore by MicroHobby comes in.

Wanting to continue maintenance and include support for other boards I started to maintain my own fork of TorizonCore, which is open-source.

So far I've managed to bring TorizonCore to run on the following boards:

• Raspberry Pi 4B (arm64v8)
• Raspberry Pi 3B (arm64v8)
• Intel/AMD (x86-64)
• Nezha Alwinner D1 (riscv64)
• Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (arm64v8)

With the exception of the Raspberry Pi 3B, which I still have to update, all are already running TorizonCore v6.2.0:

As I write this blog post, the fork is only 1 commit behind Toradex source:

The idea is to always sync the fork with the upstream development of the TorizonCore team at Toradex and add the Community commits on top.

These are the points that are still open in the TorizonCore community:

One of the coolest things about having TorizonCore running on your hardware is that it comes ready with everything needed to integrate with Torizon Platform, which provides OTA updates for OS images and containerized applications.

The TorizonCore community supports provisioning and application updates, but does not yet support OS updates (these are supported in Toradex hardware). Operating System updates have some dependencies on the bootloader. And these dependencies and details still need to be handled on my fork.

VS Code templates for Torizon are a very easy way to start a new containerized application, it has automation for remote debugging and remote deployment to the target. But they are built on top of Docker images with Toradex packages that cover Toradex hardware specifics, like GPU libraries for example. Besides they only support arm32v7 and arm64v8 architectures. To use other architectures and work ok on other hardware, we will also need to port these Docker images.

In my opinion it's not worth spending effort and time trying to upload the fork modifications to Toradex upstream. I feel that now, trying to do this will delay development and take the focus away from some experiments. This is a project that for now is purely experimental, so the pattern is to have no pattern, to try things without mercy and expect to break things.

But in the future if this becomes something that needs to maintain stable and LTS versions, synchronizing that with upstream, I foresee that I will have to try to move upstream as much as possible, so as not to have too much work.

For now I'm happy to be able to have my sandbox separate and unconcerned with conflicts of interest...

Remember Seadog? So I am now officially discontinuing it 🥹. It was really cool to share that content with you, I think it was a mutual learning experience. But the time has come to do something more useful. I was spending a considerable amount of time on the project and despite seeing the didactic value, I wasn't seeing a promising future for using the system.

With that said I will now focus on channel and blog content in the TorizonCore community. The lives and videos about operating systems for embedded Linux will be every Wednesday on my Twitch channel (sorry for now we will have only in Portuguese content). We will add features and support for new boards to TorizonCore by Toradex during the lives, I hope you there.

And then let's combine the useful with the pleasant. I keep doing what I like, sharing content with you, you learn with me something that is massively used in the market (such as Yocto project, BitBake and etc...) and we will build a community together and help grow the ecosystem of Torizon.

Last year I was also heavily involved in the development of extensions to VS Code.

And I'm working directly with New VS Code Torizon Integrated Development Environment development. Another project from Toradex Labs. This one is not open-source for now. But the project templates are. And it's another thing that I should create some content, about these templates, bug fixes, create new templates and etc...

A lot of cool stuff planned, and a lot of work, for 2023. Yeah it's going to be everything and more about Torizon. But as I said, I'm going to combine the useful with the pleasant, also because I trust and believe in Toradex work on top of this ecosystem. So I'm putting all my eggs in this basket ...