Is Picroft now the elephant in the room?

Archive - Mycroft Project
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I received the email today. I’m very excited that the team has a fully functional Mark II for sale but personally I wouldn’t be able to purchase it. $350 is out of any kind of tech budget right now when I have an already functioning Mycroft. And it seems as if I don’t get in on it now it will cost $500 which, frankly, I’ll never be able to purchase. It’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s that the $500 needs to go towards house maintenance and life purchases.

Anywho, without getting too far into my personal business, I’ve already invested roughly $100-$150 in my personal Mycroft. This is parts and the cost of plastic materials when attempting and successfully printing my enclosure.

The email specifically states that the Picroft project is no longer being developed. I’ve searched around and found a chat group dedicated to Picroft, and found somebody’s unofficial builds that potentially have the Bullseye OS. I just would like to get some clarification that the Mycroft team has no interest whatsoever in bringing features that are for the Mark II over to the Picroft image. If it’s a matter of not having the funding then we need to figure out how many people actually use Picroft and how many people want to continue using Picroft. I’ll go out of my way to rally up some sort of donation scenario, if people are willing, and maybe each one of those individuals can throw $20 to $50 your way. That’s more than reasonable to include us in the life goals of the Mycroft project.

I got into this because I wanted to put this together by myself and maintain it by myself, keeping in line with updates and features presented by the developers. Right now my Mycroft is still fully functional, but I feel like it’s lacking and will just be systematically obsoleted. If going to the Open Voice OS is the correct route, then I’m more than willing to take it. I’m just a little disheartened and confused on what I should do now. I’m also a little concerned that eventually I will have to take my Mycroft offline because there will no longer be any security updates for the Buster OS

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Hey, to clarify - the Picroft image is not being actively maintained right now.

I do hope to get back and update the build process so that we can start publishing Picroft images again, we’ve just needed to stay focused on the Mark II lately so that we could fulfill our promise to thousands of backers and get these beauties into peoples hands.

There have been a few things that I’ve been say “once Mark II’s are shipping we’ll get back to this”, and Picroft is one of them. Unfortunately even though the Mark II’s are now shipping, we are still in the very early days and working to respond to feedback, as well as scale production up. Meaning we’re not quite ready to get back to these projects, but we don’t want to abandon them entirely.

In the long run we want to have consistent behaviour across all platforms. The challenge is that doing this all up front is much slower in the short term for a single platform, so we made the call to get the Mark II ready first, then look at how the “mainline” Mycroft software needs to evolve to provide the best cross-platform experience.

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Fully functional is a bit of a stretch. I’d say minimally functional. It is more of a clock that can tell you the News and Weather and set a timer. It will answer about 30-50% of the questions you ask it and will pipe in to conversations it hasn’t been included in quite often.

As an example, as I was typing this, my wife came and asked “When are we supposed to go to dinner?”
Mycroft turned on despite no wake word being uttered and told us about the movie “Are We There Yet?”

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