Building up own MK II

Hey i am new here.

I am reading about the mycroft project and as a echo owner i want to switch over to a better solution.
I have an old raspberry 2 B in my “too good to throw away box” and want to get started to build a MK 2 like device.

I would buy a MK2 but there is no information available, when it will be ready to buy. No updates nothing. The mycroft website links to kickstarter and there it is shown, that this is inactive and i should go to indigogo… there the MK2 is sold out completely… Long story short: i want to build my own one. Can’t wait for them to update their website or keep anything up to date.

What do i want to do?

  • Control Hue Lights
  • Play spotify music
  • get weather information
  • have a display for the clock and other information as the mk2 has

What do i have at the moment:

  • Raspberry Pi 2 B
  • PS3 eye Cam and Mic
  • some passive small speakers (later i will include something better.)

What i plan to buy: The LCD HAT for the pi for the UI with the cute face on it or the information i asked for.

Now my question is: Is this possible? maybe i need a pi 3 b or even a pi 4 for this, but i will see if this is really necessary.

Most important is the LCD HAT. Can i have the ui like the MK2?

Thx in advance for your help,

Knutowskie

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Pi 2 is probably too low end to expect much, likely will be slower than you like.

A newer pi or other sbc would be a better choice (2gb ram,64 bit cpu, etc).

ok and what about the LCD Color Display? Is the UI already built in or how is it working?

the gui hasn’t been released yet. It’s a 19.8(?) timeframe I believe. For the display, you can use whatever you want, personally I’d go with 5" or more, the 3" and less are nigh impossible to get useful info from at any distance.

Ok… so how do i get answer information on the display, if i put one on the pi? and what do they use on the mk2’s for presentation? there has to be a gui but it is not available to us yet?

the gui is pretty alpha right now, you can (without support or help) play with it if you want:

You can read up more on the GUI implementation here:

There are instructions in the mycroft-gui repo to setup a test environment in KDE Neon Unstable.

And we’ve also got some new Skills that utilise the GUI under review at the moment.

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The Mark-II developers use touch sensitive Waveshare displays.

Okay so all i read is: LCD on a Pi is not usable at the moment, right? KDE is not on the pi by default. “unstable” versions is not what i want to have as x-server on a Pi.

So i am ordering a new Echo show and have all features i need for the price of my privacy. Damnit.

It’s a numbers game. amz has 200 times the resources to do…whatever they want. You can choose how to spend yours, though, depending on what’s important to you.