Today I tried @cyclicalobsessive’s scripts[1] for installing the GoPiGo libraries on a copy of Bullseye 32 bit with the following results:
The install went smoothly except for:
The installation script periodically stops and, in some cases, it’s not clear if its waiting for something or wants you to press a key. In one case, it stopped with a listing of some kind that had [END] at the bottom - I ended up pressing “Q” to escape it.
There were a number of warnings about things being depreciated. Things moved by quickly, but I don’t believe I saw any errors. If I’d had half the brains God gave a squirrel, I’d have “tee’d” it to a log file.
Apparently a default activity is for the installation to talk about things - like the IP address - which is annoying. (It should be noted that no other installations, including the GoPiGo O/S installation, are such chatterboxes. Is it possible to suppress this, (speaking the IP address), without turning off HDMI audio in general or the ability to speak when I want it to?
My test script, (“test_servos”), ran without any issues. Particularly noteworthy was the absence of i2c mutex errors.
Note that this was done using a graphical interface.
All in all, the installation and test were painless, unlike the stock Buster installation.
A large percentage of this can be avoided by using the “-y” flag on the apt install statements. I had assumed that you allowed the installations to stop because you wanted to see what happened instead of things scrolling off the screen at Mach-2.
The “[END]” thingie? I haven’t dug into the script so I don’t know what causes it - and I’m not sure how to get rid of it.
Quite frankly, I have larger and tastier fish to fry right now, so I’ll give that one a pass.
In all seriousness, the installation went remarkably smoothly, especially compared to the original Dexter installation. I’m tempted to ask you to revisit their installation script, but you would be totally justified in giving me a SMACK! if I did.
All in all, an excellent job aside from the few speed-bumps - and that should be my biggest problem, 'eh?
My only beef is the noise. My wife was yelling at me to “shut that thing off” the whole time.
Seriously, is there a way to turn the IP barker off? I presume it’s a service somewhere that I can disable - if I remember rightly. Unlike Windows, I don’t know how to find the running services on Linux/Raspberry Pi.
P.S.
I tried running some of the graphical examples on Bullseye and it turns it needs wxPython - which isn’t a run-of-the-mill install package - you gotta build it from sources! And to do that, there’s a laundry-list of dependencies you have to install first.
Right now it’s building a “wheel for wxPython”. Progress is being made as it hasn’t splashed my system with bizarre error messages, but compiling this beastie from scratch seems to be a lengthy process.
It would be nice if I could publish the built binary after it was done for the next poor sod to install.
You can also keep it but set the volume lower by changing /home/pi/ip_feedback.sh:
...
su -c "espeak-ng -a 20 'WiFi IP'" pi
su -c "espeak-ng -a 20 $IP_NUMBER" pi
su -c "espeak-ng -a 20 repeating " pi
su -c "espeak-ng -a 20 $IP_NUMBER" pi
else
su -c "espeak-ng -a 20 'no IP number'" pi
...
Display the IP. . . Actually I’m still working on that.
Right now I’m trying to decide on a suitable display that both works with the robot and doesn’t take an Act Of Congress to get working.
Once that’s done, I’ll work in getting the information I want and figuring out how to slice-and-dice the particular text strings to display on the robot’s display panel.
Right now, based on the limited experimentation I have been able to do so far, the Waveshare e-Paper displays are the easiest to use but they’re SLOW, (taking around 30+ seconds to refresh with the tri-color display being even slower), and the SPI is a task still remaining to be done.
I have a couple of 128x32 OLED displays that are, (appear to be?), a pain to use and a 16x2 display with buttons. Both use the i2c interface so there shouldn’t be any interaction.
When I am in another room, it is comforting to hear Carl announce “New Charging State - Charging” and Dave announce “Docking Success, odometry reset to 0 0”.
Just a moment ago as I am sitting three feet from Dave, he destroyed the quiet house peace by speaking at 80% volume “Battery at 10.3 volts, get ready to dock.” The announcement is intended to alert me to return him to his dock ready position when I am joysticking him around the house. Future enhancement - check his location for already in the dock ready position, before blurting out unnecessary “noise”.
Being able to make noise, (i.e. speak), is a potentially useful thing for future development.
It’s just that, right now, I don’t really need a speaking robot. It’s an arrow in my quiver, but I don’t need to shoot it right now - so I’m saving it for later.
Not to mention that - once I get to that point - all your research is going to come in REALLY HANDY.
