Picroft with GUI

Archive - Mycroft Project Picroft
1

Hi, I’m about to get started with my first Mycroft experiments. I am planning on using a Raspberry Pi 3. This is mostly for my young daughters to have a bit of fun with, as they’ve seen Amazon Alexa at other people’s houses and would like to have something similar here. My oldest (5 years old) has also started using computers in the ICT suite at school, and would also like to play around with some GUI apps.

So, I would like to get Mycroft set up with a GUI on a Rasberry Pi. I appreciate that the performance won’t be speedy, but hopefully it will be roughly “usable”. From looking around the forum I can see a few people saying they have done it, e.g., @Juk :

i have picroft updated to a GUI version working fine.
https://community.openconversational.ai/t/media-gui-display-skills/1533

My guess is that there are two broad ways of approaching this:

  1. Start from the Picroft enclosure image, and then install GUI components on it.
  2. Start from a vanilla Rasbian install, and then install Mycroft onto that.

Is there a recommendation between these approaches (or another way I’ve not yet thought of)? Which of these will be easiest to keep updated and keep running in the future?

And for whichever approach you favour, any tips on getting it going as smoothly as possible would also be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Jim

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I installed the gui stuff on the picroft image with:

# install gui start:
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xinit
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends raspberrypi-ui-mods lxterminal gvfs
sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Also works on raspbian Jessie lite.
Tried stretch, but mycroft gave me problems, with python ssl and dependencies.

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Thanks @tjoen. Noob question - with the GUI stuff installed, will it default to booting into PIXEL? Or do I need to do anything to make that happen?

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Yes, it should be the Pixel desktop…

I think that is the raspberrypi-ui-mods line, but I added just a couple of components in my command.
To install all the options in Pixel you would probably need some more features, like:

#Install PIXEL (Pi Improved Xwindow Environment, Lightweight)

 sudo apt-get install -y pi-greeter raspberrypi-ui-mods raspberrypi-artwork raspberrypi-bootloader
 sudo apt-get install -y pix-icons pix-plym-splash pixel-wallpaper
 sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods
 sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu
 sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu-doc realvnc-vnc-viewer

And to change your setup to gui as default:

sudo raspi-config 
select bootoptions
select Desktop /CLI
select Desktop Autologin Desktop GUI

Or use: startx from the terminal to run gui from terminal

Good luck :wink:

T.

1 Like
5

Thanks! Realised I don’t have a spare Micro SD card around at the moment, so I’m waiting on one of those to be delivered, but will look forward to jumping into this once it’s here!

1 Like
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I am looking to do something like this. Would something even more lightweight work too such as open box?

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That should work too, haven’t tried it though
T.