Update Your Mycroft Mark II to the New Neon AI Operating System!
The April 2023 release of Neon AI Voice Operating System dramatically enhances skills and performance for Neon AI users. Ask your Mycroft Mark II device: “Hey Neon, check for updates”.
The Neon AI private voice assistant’s latest skills now include:
Home Assistant Skills - “Hey Neon, Turn off the kitchen light”
Control Lights, switches, media players. View cameras, sensors, vacuum status and more: Ecobee, ESPHome, Google Cast, HomeKit, IKEA, Leviton Z-Wave, Lutron Caséta, MQQT, Philips Hue, Plex Media Server, Shelly, SmartThings, Sonos, Z-Wave, Zigbee.
Jokes Skill - “Hey Neon, Tell me a joke“
A full library of jokes
Improved skill vocabularies and content for many skills:
Alerts, Audio Volume, Restart, Shutdown, Stocks, Update and Weather Skills
Improved performance and fixes:
The April release provides faster responses and clearer speech.
Create back-up Neon AI boot drives to USB or SSD media using your Mark II.
“Hey Neon, Make Bootable Media”
Serious Storage!
Mark II’s have their best performance with an add-on SSD memory. A 240GB SSD USB3 memory drive is only $39. Visit the Neon Square.com shop.
Community Testers wanted: Visit the new Matrix chat room for testing requests. Developers working on advanced skills for the Neon OS will benefit from your testing and commenting on new features before release. To run advanced versions you can say: “Hey Neon, Enable pre-release updates”.
Community Developers wanted: Bounties available for skills, applications and documentation development. The Neon AI team is available to assist community developers.
Contact clary@neon.ai with your ideas and suggestions.
Very cool, and it looks like there’s a lot of new stuff in there to use. Is there a quick and easy guide to setting up Home Assistant in Neon? I found a Github site for neon-homeassistant-skill, but it wasn’t immediately clear if that was what Neon was using, and I didn’t want to go fishing around in the YAML file on the off chance I was just making more work for myself later.
That is indeed the skill it’s using! The README has been updated with better installation instructions on the PR that’s currently open for v0.0.10. Essentially, it’s recommended to use the OAuth workflow to set it up. If that doesn’t work for some reason you can edit neon.yaml with your token. Also please report back if OAuth doesn’t work for you so it can be fixed.
I didn’t notice it for a while since I normally keep my Mark2 muted with the volume all the way down, but since the latest update I’m getting no sound. If I ssh into the device and use neon-cli, the Mic level shows nothing. Despite that, I can see that Neon is hearing me in the neon-cli and I can see Neon’s response in the terminal. I don’t get any sound. No wakeup sound, no output in responses, and even playing the news or music isn’t audible. I tried rerunning the last update and got no improvement. I’ve restarted the services and shutdown the device for hours at a time with no improvement. TTS is currently set to neon-tts-plugin-coqui-remote, but since I don’t hear a wakeup sound, I doubt that’s relevant. Any ideas on what buttons I should push?
That’s not something I’ve seen before. I have some follow-up questions and a few things to try.
Hardware side:
If your Mark II isn’t producing any sounds at all, I wonder whether your speaker output connections have come loose inside the Mark II. It will take more than removing the two front screws and lifting the faceplate off to see those connections. I just took a peek inside mine and they aren’t visible without taking it apart further.
Software side:
Do you have the ability to make another boot drive for Neon, or any other OS, in order to test if the issue is caused by the boot drive, the OS, or the Mark II?
Are you running the beta track updates, or the stable releases? If you have not yet tried it, I suggest switching from whatever you are running to the other choice, and updating to that version to see if it helps.
Well, I jumped straight to the Software bit of that because I’m super lazy. I booted off the original Mycroft software that I still had, and it booted up fine. All sounds seem to work perfectly well with Mycroft on the Mark II, but not Neon on the same device. That seems to rule out the Hardware question, so laziness paid off.
The Neon software is stable track, and I’ve run the latest update on the device, and then reran it again just to see if the update would fix itself. No change there. I’m feeling like it would probably work to create new Neon boot media and just start everything from scratch, but again, lazy. If there’s a way to resolve this without rebuilding the whole system I’d much prefer that.
Lol! I’d call it “economical of effort”
I think at this point you need to re-image the drive using your computer, or have me send you a new one. I see you made a paid order originally, so I’ll also PM you a coupon code for the cost of the USB and if you’d prefer you can apply that to order a replacement upgrade to an SSD instead.
We have directions up here for imaging a drive with the Neon OS, it’s pretty straightforward.
I appreciate the offer, but I was thinking of upgrading to an SSD anyway, so I went ahead and ordered one of those from your page. Unfortunately it seems to have pulled a previous address from my payment method and there doesn’t seem to be a way to update it. Is that something you can point me in the right direction to get fixed?
I can’t even get basic functions to work when using your OS.
It takes approx 5mins to offer any function.
At a guess there is something wrong and it’s worth noting that when I use Open Voice OS I get better response times when using the same stick and port on the MK2
It also hangs on this screen and you have to force it to the clock using the settings menu
When you say you say “using the same stick” do you mean that you’ve re-imaged the same USB stick with OVOS? If that’s the case, it sounds like there was an issue with the image on your boot drive, rather than the drive itself.
The first thing I’d suggest in that case would be re-imaging the USB with the NeonOS.
No I’m not using a stick ordered from you, I’m using various usb3.0 drives and getting the same consistent results when reimaging the same drives between Neon and Open Voice:
Just to double check, are you working with a recently downloaded Neon image? We put a new release out on April 5th.
I know that we and OVOS use a lot of the same modular pieces, and we’re both hard at work on making things run faster and smoother.
If you’re working with our most recent release, then it sounds like we’ll want to run some side-by-side comparisons and see if we can identify what’s making the difference in speed and whether we can adopt it as well.
Thank you very much! We’ll look into this, and appreciate any further technical investigations or input from the community.
If you’d like, I would be happy to send you an SSD drive you can use for Neon while we work on our speed. While people report the performance on the USBs we send out is reasonable, we do find it’s much faster on SSD. This kind of detailed user feedback is very valuable, and certainly worth an SSD drive as a thank you. If you’d like that, here is the link to order, and I’m PMing you a personal coupon code to make it free.
Hmmm, I hadn’t seen that with Neon yet, but I have experienced similar symptoms with Dinkum. I didn’t look deeply enough to guess what the common denominator might be. I hope it at least helps to confirm I’ve seen something like this on the Mark II before.
