Pi4J contributor Tom Aarts joins Frank Delporte for a hands-on session focused on hardware testing in Pi4J V4. Tom has been a long-time contributor to the Pi4J ecosystem. He added example devices, improved core code by finding gaps through real-world usage, and most recently designed the Pi4J Smoke Test hardware setup that makes integration testing on real Raspberry Pi hardware practical and repeatable.

Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of March 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.

Version 1.2.0 of Lottie4J is out, and it’s again a big release! The headline feature is support for the .lottie container format, but that’s just the start. This release also brings marker-based playback, cropping, adaptive rendering, significant performance improvements, and a lot of core model fixes driven by testing more complex real-world animations.

Live stream with Matti Tahvonen and Frank Delporte with the smell of smoked food and fresh Java code! Matti from the Vaadin team shows a project that started as a Raspberry Pi side project and turned into a full-blown IoT application. He has built a smoker controller — yes, an actual BBQ smoker — with Pi4J V4, Vaadin for the UI, and Quarkus on the backend. So we can now officially say that Pi4J V4 has been smoke-tested in production…

Just one week after the first public release of Lottie4J, the open-source Java library for rendering Lottie animations in JavaFX, version 1.1.0 is already out. And it’s a big one!

Live stream with Nick Gritsenko and Frank Delporte about the Foreign Function and Memory (FFM) API that got introduced in Java 22, and how it was used to create a new plugin for the Pi4J library. This will help to bring electronics programming with Java to many more boards and help to simplify the Pi4J project.

I’m proud to present a new JavaFX library: Lottie4J, that brings Lottie animations to JavaFX applications. I first learned about Lottie many years ago when we were developing a mobile app. We used Lottie animations to explain to users how to operate a physical device. The animations made the instructions so much clearer than static images or text alone.

Open source software is built on passion, time, and dedication. But passion alone doesn’t guarantee the long-term survival of a project. Maintainers move on, life changes, priorities shift, and sometimes a beloved project simply fades away. Something we want to avoid for the Pi4J project. So I’m very happy that I can share that on February 26, Pi4J got accepted into the Commonhaus Foundation. This is a major step to make sure that this Java library, used by many developers in all kinds of projects, can continue to exist and grow.

Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of February 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.

In my “Java on Single Board Computers” series, I already published several posts and videos in which I unpack the board, connect it for the first time, and try to install and run some simple Java code. In this post, I want to share some benchmarks of Java on these boards to get a better idea of the performance we can expect from Java on these platforms.