Building custom GNU/Linux IoT distribution for Raspberry Pi using the Yocto Project

I joined the second edition of the Eclipse Open IoT challenge. I am working on a hobby IoT project which was recently renamed to RabbitMax. I have created a custom GNU/Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi using the Yocto Project that suits the exact needs of my project.

Yocto is a collaborative project of the Linux foundation that uses the Openembedded framework and bitbake build engine. Poky is the reference system of the Yocto Project with a six month release cycle. It provides meta data divided into layers and recipes for building various packages and images. Here are the exact steps how to building minimal Poky image for Raspberry Pi 2.

As part of my hobby project I am working on a weather station based on Raspberry Pi 2 and Sense HAT therefore I have created additional meta layer called meta-rabbitmax. Image rpi-sense-hat-weather-image extends rpi-basic-image by adding the command line network manager for embedded devices connman, Node.js, Python and other development tools.