A New Dawn For GoPiGo OS?

GoPiGo OS, DexterOS and Bloxter
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Something really exciting is about to happen! Raspberry Pi Foundation will be the new home for Blockly on Nov 10, 2025.

GoPiGo OS continues to be the “Ready To Go” environment for Raspberry Pi powered GoPiGo3 robots, including the browser based Bloxter programming environment making it easy to connect and program.

The transition of the Blockly personnel probably means the next version of Raspberry Pi OS will ship with Blockly.

It would be really great if we had a “sudo apt install GoPiGo-OS” package that would install all the nifty GoPiGo OS features to that new OS.

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I have been asking for that since I first assembled Charlie back in the Stone Age.

Ideally we should have all the tools and scripts they use to produce a GoPiGo-3 OS image. With this we could try to create images that incorporate the latest OS foundation.

Unfortunately, MR has been less than forthcoming with this idea.

I have tried to reverse-engineer the OS, with pitiful success.

Note:
I have been told that Bloxter is a custom fork of Blockly with the necessary features for the GoPiGo robots.

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I was thinking to set my sights a little smaller with:

sudo apt install gopigo3-blockly

that would install:

  1. The full Pi2 to Pi4 compatible GoPiGo3 API and Examples (no Pi5 support)
  2. blockly with GoPiGo3 custom blocks
  3. dependencies like espeak-ng if not already in the distribution
    Perhaps) The Text-To-Speech IP announcer service

And I started learning what that takes… BIG MOUNTAIN CLIMB

  • I built a .deb file easy-peasy.
  • I used the .deb file to apt install / apt remove - my gopigo3-version test program - looking good so far.
  • (skip over the details of creating the full content for my .deb file - not easy, not hard, just do it work.)
  • I then asked how would I get my gopigo3-blockly-1.0.deb hosted for distribution with the next release of RPiOS?

Long process that needs a partnership, review, recommendation, and …

In the end, I decided there is not enough audience for that much investment.

GoPiGo OS offers everything anyone needs to use the GoPiGo3 for several years of daily learning.

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Just out of curiosity, I loaded up GoPiGo OS and took a look around - a few observations

  • The entire install procedure, source code, install notes, card setup notes,
    (and even the user sam password) are on the image
  • There are liberal “This program is free software: redistribute…modify under GNU General Public License” everywhere
  • All the blockly “web_app” code is there, with a setup.py even.
  • The entire body of code is quite amazing

I again come to the conclusion - nothing to be gained by investing in recreating it over later PiOS and lots of potential break points that will require time working on the port, that would be better spent using the existing GoPiGo OS to the max.

Theoretically, you could push the entire GoPiGo OS up to a private GitHub repo and you would have “all the tools and scripts they use”

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