I received my USB disk with Neon OS, and a short User Guide for twenty US dollars in less than a week nearing Christmas => impressed with price, delivery and some docs
Switched out the Dinkum USB drive for the Neon in the Mark II and powered on => green/orange/white splash screen for a couple minutes
Pressed “On Device Setup” as per User Guide and selected my wireless SSID => impressed
Presented with a “keyboard” to enter password - it connected in under a minute => impressed
Said “Hey Neon”… “What’s the news” => got the definition of the news … hmmm
Said “Hey Neon”… “Play the news” => played NPR news => impressed
Tried “Play Abbey Road”, “Play the blues”, “Play classic rock”, “Play some music” => all replies were “not sure …” => not impressed
“Play music” => played a random song… OK
Tried “What time is it” and “What’s the weather” => worked, good but expected
Plugged in a USB drive with a few thousand songs to another slot and gave it 15 or so minutes to index. Tried to play music by artist/album/track => all replies were “not sure …” => not impressed
So Neon AI is great out of the gate, but like Mycroft Mark II/Dinkum, does not play music well :((
We gotta do better than this as a community, no? (sigh …)
So Neon AI is great out of the gate, but like Mycroft Mark II/Dinkum, does not play music well :((
I’ve been trying to figure out a good solution here, the issue I’ve run into (as I suspect Mycroft has), is that no mainstream music service I could think of provides an API or any kind of stable interface. The current included skill uses Free Music Archive since their website is fairly static and the music is all royalty free.
I think a skill to play from a local storage device or maybe even a network share would be a nice addition as I’ve seen more people talking about that functionality on the Mark2 than I previously expected.
Might be a dumb question. Does Neon have capability of installing Mycroft skills?
Not a dumb question at all; Mycroft “classic” (non-Dinkum) skills definitely can be installed under Neon. Currently, this can be done via SSH or a terminal on-device using ovos-skill-manager.
they work for me (I am the author), please open github issues if you run into problems
they are not installed by default, you need to install them manually. Voice won’t work either, this was on purpose as it is dangerous to install arbitrary untested code by voice, very easy to accidentally install the wrong thing (eg, bad STT) and potentially brick your system. install needs to be done via command line, there will be a GUI for this in the future including alternative skill marketplaces not tied to mycroft (WIP, in upcoming months, not years)
NOTE: these require the OCP framework, using it in classic mycroft-core is possible but a little convoluted to setup because it replaces the native common play mechanisms, ovos-core and Neon use it out of the box by default
How do I ssh in? (I have the IP address, but no user/password)
Default username/password is neon/neon and you will be prompted to change the default password on first connection. Uses the default SSH port 22, so ssh neon@<IP_ADDRESS> is all you need from a bash or PowerShell terminal.
I can’t find any documentation on how to get music working. It would be nice if it were in the 8 page user guide that came with the USB drive (and neon/neon).
I tried mycroft-skills --help, but did not get help. Rather, there was a lot of output about skills and after a couple of minutes appeared to be looping. It took a few SIGINTs to stop it.
I can’t find any documentation on how to get music working. It would be nice if it were in the 8 page user guide that came with the USB drive (and neon/neon).
Thanks for pointing out missing docs; we do still have some work to do there. As @JarbasAl mentioned, OSM is the utility to use in this case for installing a skill.
I tried mycroft-skills --help , but did not get help. Rather, there was a lot of output about skills and after a couple of minutes appeared to be looping. It took a few SIGINTs to stop it.
This is interesting, I’ll have to look at removing that entrypoint in Neon images since it won’t do anything useful.
Hi @mike99mac, thank you for the detailed feedback, it is so helpful to us in improving our offerings. In editing the skills list I noticed we need to change a few titles for clarity, including the current music skill, which is alphabetized under “F” because its name is “Free Music Archive”. We’re also working on making it possible to plug in a USB drive of music, now that we know from you, a few others, and general feedback on this forum, how much it is wanted.
I’m reformatting the skills to fit on fewer sheets of paper, and on creating an actual user guide to go with the quick start guide and skills list that I was able to send you. I’d be happy to mail you a paper copy of the new versions when I’ve got them finished next week - this kind of user feedback really is invaluable. I’ll also be posting the links to the documents in pdf & as a Google Docs version that people can leave feedback comments on directly.
I’m putting a link to purchase the USB drive here, in hopes that others will find it helpful and provide similarly excellent feedback. It truly is a “convenience” product. We make no profit, and you can download the same OS for free from our website, but we’re happy to make it easier for people to try out Neon AI. Neon AI for Mycroft Mark II Bootable USB Drive | Neon AI
Hi @brianread we’re at work right now on more music options for the Neon OS. Apologies for the belated reply, I thought I’d replied on here, but it must have only been in my own head.
This would be a nice feature. I have a Drobo at the house and could just stream direct from there. I wish we could somehow get jellyfin working on these units, video, audio, etc. Not that I would sit and watch a movie on it but it might be cool to have it playing classic movies in the background while I work.