Same experience here – it felt like I purchased a product that had a corrupt or partial software install.
To compound this, the on-line docs either don’t apply or have broken links.
It’s been very frustrating, and has largely convinced me not to purchase a second one.
Please, help change my mind.
Not being able to install skills makes the device mostly a novelty. Any ETA on when CLI or Marketplace skill install will be enabled?
I’ve been unable to install many other skills (for example “List Manager”, “Theia IDE”) through the Mycroft interface. I think I’ve installed them via and SSH connection, but the absence of documentation for Mycroft II and the absence of the utilities that are mentioned in the docs leaves me unable to activate to use the skills.
Lots of stuff seems to be missing or broken (ie. no pre-installed skill to safely shutdown the device, no pointer to the Mycroft II-specific docs showing how to get to the on-screen menu, etc).
It feels like I’ve gotten a crippled device, with less functionality than if I had made it a DIY hardware project and used the available software – at a lower cost.
Notes on the documentation:
Mostly a paperweight, IMHO.
The Mycroft II docs say:
Please note, at this time the Mark II does not include a Configuration Manager utility. Any changes must be made directly to your mycroft.conf
with a link to docs about mycroft.conf … that directs people to use the configuration manger utility if possible.
If I were to edit one of the mycroft.conf files (at my own peril, with neither a safety net nor a json syntax checker), what’s the recommended way from the CLI, without mycroft-config, to tell dbus to reload the new config?
We have a more complete post coming soon, but the short version is that the Mark II ships with the “retail” version of the software. This version does not have certain features that we found problematic to get right for the non-technical user.
Rest assured, we will soon be releasing images that allow you make use of the hardware with any version of Mycroft. This should be within days, not months.
We are also working on making the documentation more clear, for all the versions.
Thank you much appreciated!
I also went thru not being able to install additional skills. This leaves the device in a pretty un-useful state. Wish you guys would have warned people. After trying a voice install to no avail, I then spent hours looking for a “mycroft-msm” command, that it apparently doesn’t have.
Is the Dinkum API going to be modified or extended to support the existing marketplace apps or are we on our own/starting over?
Was really hoping to install some of the existing skills on day one.
This is very frustrating. I was hoping to start phasing out the Alexa device as soon as my Mark II arrived but this “retail” version of the software is essentially useless. I don’t think anyone who pre-ordered one of these was expecting to get a 100% reliable box that can do a handful of simple tasks.
The lack of communication about this is surprising, I am sure there was pressure to get the devices shipped but I would have preferred to wait for a fully functional OS than to get a box that mocks me with it’s limited capabilities.
It was particularly surprising for a free and open source project to arrive with significant design changes which don’t seem to have been developed in public, which no one in the community seems to have known about, and for which the source code still doesn’t seem to have been published anywhere. Similarly, the devices seem to have been distributed without instructions or scripts for replacing the installed OS with modified versions.
The "Dinkum” redesign may well be for the better: the explanation for the changes in README files I’ve found while SSH’ed into the device does make sense. But it would be more reassuring even just to be able to find those README files in a Git repository somewhere, or to have a clear place to report bugs (e.g. Mark II: bad news url in web UI breaks `dinkum-skills.service` · Issue #96 · MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-II · GitHub).
I hope more communication is indeed coming “within days, not months” (given that it’s now been a week).
I was expecting – and would be very happy with – an OS that is not 100% fully functional, but which is open, allowing the use of skills that already exist for other Mycroft versions, and which is customizable and well documented.
Hi all,
We definitely did not have the documentation up to scratch before launch. It has been a non-stop sprint to get this Mark II out for longer than I can even think about. We’ve been punching out new docs quickly to help you get up to speed, and I’m very keen to hear about anything missing or that just needs more detail:
We’re also in the process of getting all the repos for the Mark II public along with more information on what Dinkum is, why we went that route. There are also additional images to use your Mark II hardware in whatever way you choose. There’s one that runs classic mycroft-core, and also a bare bones DIY image that contains only the Mark II hardware drivers on a Raspberry Pi OS base - everything required to utilize the Mark II as your own voice development platform.
Finally we are very keen to hear what features or improvements you want to see for the Mark II to inform our future roadmap. To help with this I’ve created a new forum category and brought back the voting module. If you have ideas please add them here, or vote them up if someone has already posted about it.
Thanks for the update, I am glad to hear there are alternative images to use.
Will your team be producing written guides or a video for the end-to-end process of taking our Mark 2’s and putting regular mycroft-core on it?
I think many us who ordered these are newcomers to Mycroft in general. I know i am
Dielan
seconded, am in the exact same situation.
Hey, working on the documentation now actually. But overall it’s a simple as flashing the image you want to a USB, plugging it in, and booting the Mark II.
The two exceptions I can think of is
After that the Pairing Skill will prompt you to add it to your account just like the Dinkum image.
It should also be noted that the classic mycroft-core experience won’t be as polished as the retail version Dinkum. There are bugs and quirks, and that’s a pretty big reason for why we made Dinkum in the first place.
I got to agree with LiberalArtist here; I’ve spent quite a few hours hacking and tinkering, writing a couple of skills for Mycroft, getting the setup just so; now all that work is, without communication from core-devs, deprecated or required to be ported to a new platform. I was working on:
I appreciate the difficulty of what you’re trying to do, but working behind closed doors and then sort of “hard forking” your own project – without warning anyone who might be messing with your code – is an unpleasant thing to do to your community. Like, will the dinkum repo be able to run outside the mark 2 hardware? If I develop a skill, am I forced to choose developing for an unsupported platform that works on a pi or working on a mark 2?
I placed on order for the mark 2 based on the promise of a really hackable, open and integrity-focused piece of software. I’m paying a premium over what Amazon/Google/Apple provide, and happy to do so, but when I pay that premium I’m not simply hoping Mycroft succeeds or that I get a good device (indeed, I expect Mycroft won’t compete in UX for some years), but that Mycroft can be a platform that I can be part of. For this to work, you all have to merge PRs, and be really transparent about what’s up inside your org.
Again, I appreciate that you all seem to be in serious production hell, and underwater, but you’ve set a really high bar for yourselves when you advertise a different kind of product and different kind of company, and making trade-offs that favor “consumer experience” over community-engagement are the kind that make me think about cancelling my order and just going back to alexa.
Hi @osheroff,
For those that want the extensibility and access to the existing ecosystem - we have released a Classic Core image that includes all the tooling you’d be used to and is completely compatible with all the Skills you’ve been working on.
We built Dinkum because we wanted to show what was possible with heavily refactored code, and provide the best possible direct user experience when people plug their Mark II in for the first time. We did this “behind closed doors” because we were trying lots of different things and every time we did this publicly there was an outcry that it wasn’t backwards compatible. We tried to explain our intentions the first few times, but honestly, our dev team was able to move far more quickly by hunkering down and just trying things out in private.
Dinkum was made as a fork, precisely because we didn’t want to force this on everyone and it is only written to work on the Mark II. For those like yourself that have written Skills we didn’t want to suddenly force you to port this to a new framework, particularly before we’d really tested it out in the field.
Maybe we should have released Classic Core as the default and provided Dinkum as an optional image? However Dinkum is simply far more stable. So for consumers that aren’t comfortable on the command line it provides the best experience as a voice assistant performing the core functions that we’ve seen people use most.
For yourself, if Classic Core is working well, then I wouldn’t bother porting your Skills to Dinkum. Just grab the Classic Core Sandbox image and away you go.
It’s an interesting point about making trade-off’s between “consumer experience” and “community engagement”. I think I need to sit with that for a bit, but I do hope that we can find a place where as a community we are working toward a better consumer experience together.