After many hours, and multiple attempts are restarting from scratch (redoing the image), it seems there might be some kind of contention problem on boot. When I boot and start mycroft, the speaker mic level is blank (no bar or movement). I do get log messages coming in from the background services, but Mycroft doesn’t respond to any voice. I quit and restart (which I guess just loads cli at this point) and the mic level is there and it moves, but the value is really low (10-100).
After quitting and doing some combination of killing and starting pulseaudio and stopping and starting respeakerd, I’m able to use parecord to make a recording that plays back … without doing so, I get either silence or occasional squeeks in the recording. When I’m able to do a recording, I can load mycroft fresh and it works, but mic levels are in the thousands. It seems like either something in the boot process seems to be hanging up or capturing the audio device? I need to figure out the proper sequence of starting/stoping the processes and see if that can narrow it down.
Edit (Because discourse won’t let me post 4 times in a row)…
Maybe this will help someone in the future since there seems nothing unique about my setup other than I’m doing this now (Sep '20) and not back in Jan '19. Plenty could have actually changed since then.
First, @Dominik, in your first post, between the update and upgrade, can you add an ‘apt-mark hold’ to prevent firefox from being updated.
sudo apt update
sudo apt-mark hold firefox-esr
sudo apt upgrade
Without this, after you do the upgrade, firefox errors out everytime you try to launch it.
Second, to fix the error message with setuptools, I added the export command I mentioned above to my .bashrc file. I don’t know enough about linux to know if there is a better way of doing it or if doing it this way won’t work with autostarting or not…
Which leads me to the third, I assume I cannot autostart mycroft because I have to manually stop and restart respeakerd before I can get mycroft to work after a boot. I’m not sure what’s causing the problem because I’ve rebuilt from image about 4 times today and got the same results each time… to get around it, I issue the following right after I ssh in:
sudo systemctl stop respeakerd
sudo systemctl start respeakerd
Then when I launch mycroft, and patiently wait for it to be fully loaded, it works.
Finally, I was really surprised to see how much CPU was used while mycroft was running… it sits at 75% cpu usage on average the entire time. I think it will work for my application, but its not a lot of headroom.