(Rant on)
So I thought I’d try to write an app for a Pi project with Xojo.
So I looked at the Xojo website to learn about Raspi specific topics. However, practically all pages one finds on the website (basically Xojo: Program Your Raspberry Pi) just make lots of promises and then all link to the Download, which in turn doesn’t even tell you that the Linux IDE download doesn’t even run on a Pi5, even though Xojo could build for ARM for many years now. No, only after googling why it doesn’t work you’ll learn that the IDE does not work on the Pi, and there’s no pointer that you can use the Remote Debugger at least to run the apps on the Pi - you’ll only learn that if you know about it already and know where to look.
Also, no mentioning of the Pi 5.
And the app that I run, which have a Label and a Button, still cuts off (clips) the Button at the bottom, and the Pi specific docs that I eventually found (Raspberry Pi — Xojo documentation) do not provide a solution for that.
Next I wanted to use the GPIO, so I read GPIO — Xojo documentation - which says I need to install the wiringPi library - which has long gone.
What a disappointing mess. No wonder no one takes Xojo seriously if things are so hard to get going on a Pi - the promise of using Xojo for Pi development is a failed one. Sure, if you’re persistent, you can still probably solve most of these issues by going thru the forum posts that had to deal with the same issues, but if Xojo ever thought of attracting new devs this way, this is not it.
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RPi is kind of a big missed opportunity for Xojo. So many RPi users could benefit, and then be potential Xojo users for other platforms.
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(Rant off)
So, what’s the latest and greatest Xojo / Pi resources I should know about?
There’s that ebook from a few years ago - is that still fairly up-to-date?
And Ulrich Bogun’s pigpio module hasn’t been updated for 8 years either - is that still working with current Pi OS (bookworm 64bit) and Pi5 hardware?
Or where should I go nowadays?
For the clipping then tick mark this here:
That solves it most of the time.
For GPIO, I2C and SPI on Raspberry Pi 5, (and older models) as well as almost all 3rd party boards:
(The 3 plugins are are top, completely free and open source)
I do not know why Xojo does not update the Raspberry documentation or link to something that works, the old wiring Pi thing will never work again.
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Hi Björn,
The “normalize control sizes” checkbox is already checked - doesn’t help. I believe am using using the wayland GUI - maybe that has new sizes that Xojo isn’t prepared for? I have no clue, though.
I ran into your module in another thread and tried it - it works nicely. Thanks for offering them for free!
i do not know, I have only ran the default Raspberry Pi GUI and default Armbian GUI on the 3rd party boards.
(though the normalize thing does not always work, its good to add tiny bit of height to the button in the IDE, it does not grow them on macOS anyhow)
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I just filed this ticket here about the Raspberry GPIO documentation in case if someone wants to sign onto it:
https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/76949
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