Revision 3 of 3, by Ultbo on 1-23-2023. The page as it is now.

Ultibo core

This article applies to Raspberry Pi only.

Ultibo core is an embedded run-time platform and development environment written specifically for creating applications with small single board computers. It is built around the Free Pascal compiler and the Lazarus integrated development environment. Ultibo core is an RTL written entirely in Free Pascal and designed to make embedded or bare metal development accessible to all.

Installation

Windows

A Windows installer is available and full source plus a large collection of examples is included.

macOS

Use FPC 3.1.1 the trunk version (so you have the source)
Download arm-none-eabi toolchain from https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/5.0/5-2015-q4-major/+download/gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_2-2015q4-20151219-mac.tar.bz2
Extract the files in ~/Documents/gcc-arm-none-eabi
git clone from https://github.com/ultibohub at least Core, FPC, and Lazarus
You have 3 folders now, Core, FPC and Lazarus. Copy ultibo folder from Core/source/rtl/ultibo/ to FPC/source/rtl/
type cd FPC/source
type and wait until it finishes without errors:

pascal

make distclean OS_TARGET=ultibo CPU_TARGET=arm SUBARCH=armv7a CROSSBINDIR=~/Documents/gcc-arm-none-eabi/arm-none-eabi/bin/
     CROSSOPT="-CpARMV7A -CfVFPV3 -CIARM -OoFASTMATH"

type and wait:

pascal

make all OS_TARGET=ultibo CPU_TARGET=arm SUBARCH=armv7a CROSSBINDIR=~/Documents/gcc-arm-none-eabi/arm-none-eabi/bin/ CROSSOPT="-CpARMV7A -CfVFPV3 -CIARM -OoFASTMATH"

type and wait, assuming your FPC 3.1.1 is in the folder /usr/local/lib/fpc/3.1.1/ so option INSTALL_BASEDIR becomes INSTALL_BASEDIR=/usr/local/lib/fpc/3.1.1/

pascal

sudo make crossinstall CROSSBINDIR=~/Documents/gcc-arm-none-eabi/arm-none-eabi/bin/ CROSSOPT="-CpARMV7A -CfVFPV3 -CIARM -OoFASTMATH" OS_TARGET=ultibo CPU_TARGET=arm SUBARCH=armv7a INSTALL_BASEDIR=/usr/local/lib/fpc/3.1.1/

Linux

An installation script is available for Linux, full source plus a large collection of examples is included.

Supported Devices

Raspberry Pi A, B, A+, B+
Raspberry Pi Zero, ZeroW and Zero2W
Raspberry Pi 2 model B
Raspberry Pi 3 model B
Raspberry Pi 3 model A+, B+
Raspberry Pi 4 model B
Raspberry Pi 400
QEMU emulator

Features

Features include:

Support for all models of Raspberry Pi (except Pico)
Pre-emptive threading
Full range of locking and synchronization primitives
Multicore support on Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 with all cores sharing workload
Thread priority, affinity and migration support
Complete IPv4 stack including TCP, UCP, ICMP and raw sockets as well as DNS and DHCP protocols
USB support with drivers for Hub, Keyboard, Mouse, Storage, Network, HID, Touch, Gamepad and Joystick
MMC/SD/SDIO device support including eMMC devices on Raspberry Pi Compute Modules
Full support for FAT12/16/32, NTFS and CDFS filesystems
Interrupt handling
Hardware exception handling (catch an exception in code not a crash)
Complete RTL with strings, code pages, Unicode, classes, objects and exceptions
Clock and Timezone support
Console and framebuffer support including Fonts
Basic Shell (Console or Telnet) with file system commands and many others
HTTP/SMTP/POP3/NTP/Syslog client and server modules included
Support for Raspberry Pi devices like Timer, Watchdog and Random
Full Winsock 1.1 and Winsock 2 implementation
Packaged with a full compiler and IDE for quick start to development
Includes example projects plus a full demo image
HTTP image update module included (No SD card dance!)

Drivers added for:

DMA
GPIO
UART and Serial
I2C
SPI
PWM
PL2303 and FTDI USB to Serial devices
USB support for the LAN7515 (LAN78XX) chip

New and enhanced features:

Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 support (32 bit only)
Additional code page support
Common cipher and hash algorithms for the beginning of crypto support
Real time clock (RTC) support (with driver for DS1307 and similar chips)
Static IP support with command line configuration
Updated Lazarus IDE with modern docked layout
Extra fonts plus new font creation tools
Support for common LCD displays like the Adafruit 16x2
QEMU ARM emulation support
Port of the Asphyre/PXL graphics library
Support for the FreeVision windowing package
Standard C library support including POSIX threads
Fast interrupt (FIQ) support
Hardware accelerated OpenGL ES and OpenVG graphics and support for the official Pi camera

Videos

Ultibo Demo 1.0.0

Discovering Ultibo

Links

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Ultibo core", as the Internet Archive kept it on 2025-06-16, last changed on 2023-01-24. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.