Sorry if this is the wrong section, I have a few questions and wasn’t sure where was the most appropriate place to ask them.
1: I’m planning on having a go at jerry rigging my own Mycroft with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Jabra 410 (already own the Pi & found a reasonably priced used Jabra on ebay) If I were to incorporate a small screen to the build, something similar to the one on the Mark II, would I get the on-screen features the Mark II has or is that specific to the “Retail” unit on the Kickstarter?
2: I’ve been following a youtuber by the name of Paul Hibbert who makes tutorials for Alexa (excuse my bad language) and one of the tools he utilises in conjunction with the aforementioned virtual s̶p̶y̶ “assistant” is the Broadlink RM Pro. I don’t pretend to fully understand how such witchcraft works yet, but I’m wondering if Mycroft can be used with the Broadlink Thingymabobber to control Infra-red devices?
3: On the Kickstarter video, I noticed an interesting graphic and was wondering what it was or what it’s purpose was, I’ll try and upload the image below. I’m guessing it’s maybe one of the “Faces” mentioned in the presentation or some sort of graphical representation of the Mycroft voice but I just wanted to clarify as I may have another question relating to it.
Great questions, @Storm. Let me take them one by one.
MARK II SCREEN
We’ve recently finalized the screen selection for Mark II - you can read more here. However, we have not yet written the code which will control the visual display to the screen. What you’re hoping to do might be possible in the future, but I can’t guarantee it.
If you’re interested in extending your RPi, you may also need to have GPIO support. We have a little bit in our documentation about this:
and you might find this community-developed Skill helpful as well;
BROADLINK RM PRO and INFRARED
None of the Mycroft range of devices has support for Infra-Red communication, which operates over the 455 MHz frequency. I don’t know whether it would be possible to have an Infra-Red controller attached to the RPi / Picroft, but I’m not aware of anyone who has modified Picroft in this way, sorry.
GRAPHIC USED
The graphics used in the Kickstarter video are based on our 3D printed Mark II prototype - ie that’s a real Mark II in the photo. The graphics that it is displaying are an artist’s impression only at this stage.
Very happy to answer any other questions you might have,
@KathyReid I know that both the Mark I and the Picroft have access to GPIO because they’re both based on the Raspberry Pi. What can you tell us about the Mark II and GPIO?
Again, good question @linuxrants. I don’t have a lot of information on this one because the mainboard for the Mark II has not yet been selected, nor has the operating system. We’ve decided to move away from the RPi, simply because it’s not powerful enough to do some of the things we want to do on board, like local STT. Instead we’ve been looking at Xilinx, which does seem to have good GPIO support, but I can’t be more specific around which board and which operating system. @derick-mycroft may want to add additional commentary here.
I should probably have asked these questions and researched the project before I started buying parts for it. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made an error like this, probably won’t be the last either
It will still be interesting to experiment with PiCroft and I shall live in hope of screen support.
