How to get the latest Blender on a Raspberry Pi

Why?

Raspberry Pi (and alike) are single board computers on a budget and are totally capable of running Blender. Although it would be unreasonable to consider this as a high end 3D content creation machine, I have successfully ran simple and fun Blender projects on a Raspberry Pi. Shiv Integer lived its first 2 weeks on such a small computer running of a 32Go card.

This tutorial is dedicated to Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, the other human behind Shiv, and famous puppet master running bots off Pis.

Assumptions

I'm going to assume that the only thing you want is to run the latest Blender, without user interface, on a Raspberry Pi. The installation of a Graphical User Interface for Linux and whole Desktop like environment is not the subject of this tutorial.

Arch Linux ARM

We are going to use Arch Linux instead of the usual Raspbian. Arch Linux is not much different than any other Linux distribution but offers a great advantage: it provides the latest package for almost any software you can think of.

Raspbian might allow you to install Blender using their package manager, but it will certainly not be the latest. And since the Blender Foundation does not provide compiled versions of Blender for ARM chips, you're stuck compiling yourself Blender on a Raspbian system, which is definitely a very long and complex task.

There is a big community behind Arch Linux with great documentation. And a branch of that community is dedicated to run Arch Linux easily on any ARM based computer.

So the first thing we will have to do is install Arch Linux on the Raspberry Pi 2. For that, we go to https://archlinuxarm.org/ and click in the submenu > Platforms > ARMv7h > Broadcom > Rasperry Pi 2. Select the tab there called installation and follow the instructions.

Some notes on ArchLinuxArm and install instructions

As you can see on the website, there is a lot of platforms, from ARMv5h to ARMv8h. It's also good to know the manufacturer of your ARM chip. Broadcom is the manufacturer behind all Raspberry Pi chips. You also maybe noted that if you have a Raspberry Pi 3 (ARMv8h), the installation instruction won't be different than from the Pi2. It uses the same archive in this case.

Also note that you can do a search on the ArchLinuxArm website to find out which package/software is available for your system. You'll see that Blender so far is only available for armv7h. This does not mean that other software won't run on it, but you'lll have to compile them yourself.

It seems these install instructions only work from a Linux computer. You might try it though from a MacOSX platform if it supports ext4 filesystem (not sure it's there by default). If not, use any live Linux USB to fire up a temporary Linux system and follow the instructions.