It gave no error message. Just hung there.

However, tonight when I tried it again, and followed your instruction of using DeviceOpen[] first, Mathematica seemed to download some kind of update from Wolfram server, and it works exactly as you have shown.

So, it is working now. Thanks a lot for your feedback.

The behavior you're seeing is specific to this particular release of our Raspberry Pi distribution (it's not even really a Linux-ARM issue).

Yes, lot't of fun. I have to shop for more supplies.

In addition to v10.3 of Mathematica, we also have access to an experimental hardware accelerated OpenGL driver for the RPi. It's not quite ready for prime time yet, but I was wondering if and how this new package can help with 3D graphics rendering in Mathematica. The examples demoing the new OpenGL driver are pretty nice, but when I enabled the driver, I saw no significant speed enhancement when rendering, for example the output of Plot3D.

I am not familiar with graphics driver technology. Is the acceleration due to the hardware driver supposed to automatically enhance the performance of Mathematica? Is this something that can be enabled user-side? I see some mention of OpenGL (and Mesa - don't know what that is) under SystemInformation[]; is Mathematica for the RPi compiled with software rendering, making the new experimental driver useless for the time being?

Thanks for the response, Alex. As I mentioned, I'm not familiar with driver technology and did not know if this was something that could be enabled at the user-end or if it needed to be integrated into the design. You answered that question.

Keith,

I can reproduce the error with mathematica. When using wolfram I do not get a problem, but as I have not used this package, I cannot debug further to see if the package loaded properly.

FWIW, I get the error "Assertion 'result' failed at FunctionalFrequency.h:561" if I run mathematica from the command line. The following, however, indicates that the package is working and is a possible workaround. From a command line type wolfram then in the session:

<<JavaGraphics`
<<NDSolve`FEM`
bmesh = ToBoundaryMesh[Disk[]]
o = ToElementMesh[bmesh]["Wireframe"]
Show[o]

The wiremesh appears for me. In my setup I am connecting to the RPi via SSH and have an X server running on my Windows machine, so the java graphics works.

The VideoCore IV doesn't have any OpenCL support, to my knowledge. So if someone were to write accelerated BLAS libraries for it, they would be low-level and completely specific to that GPU (if they were really beneficial at all).

Honestly, I think we would be happy to just get the VideoCore doing what it was designed to do for our software as opposed to making it do something it was never intended to do. We also experimented with performance tuned BLAS libraries for the ARM CPU, but the Raspberry Pi distribution's use of ARMv6 [Raspberry Pi 1] software for their ARMv7 [Raspberry Pi 2] and ARMv8 [Raspberry Pi 3] devices makes that very difficult. Libraries like OpenBLAS don't do the same sort of runtime CPU detection that things like Intel MKL do and the hand-tuned assembly for ARMv6 will often just crash on ARMv7 (and have missing operations if you target ARMv7 and attempt to run it on ARMv6).

I would definitely be interested if anyone did create such libraries, though. Of course a tremendous amount of time and validation from vendors and the community would be required to get them up the quality where they'll be accurate enough in all scenarios we rely on them. For now, I'm having to use very basic CBLAS because it's the best way to deliver software that runs on all generations of the Raspberry Pi and is relatively accurate.

That's great news! :-) I can't wait to play with the Sense HAT.

Mathematica is now at version 10.3. This adds support for a larger set of the functionality detailed in Stephen Wolfram’s new “Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language” book. It also supports the use of the Sense HAT, adds interfacing to Arduino, and includes many new Mathematica functions.

@BoB LeSuer, I'm looking forward to learning from your up coming experiments.