OpenVoiceOS - A bare minimal (production type of) OS based on Buildroot

Feel free to ping me, I can share some knowledge.

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Showcase of OAuth & Home Assistant;

You scan the QR-Code with your mobile that prompts you for your HASS credentials after which automagically your OpenVoiceOS device gets authorised.

The OAuth PHAL plugin is developed also for future skills such as Spotify and similar.

Please bare in mind that the voice control is not yet implemented but currently being worked by and under control of NeonGecko.

A big shout out of gratitude to our Friends over at NeonGecko.com @NeonClary

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Having trouble with this image on my Mark 2 … on booting up it goes into a screen insisting I set up a raspberry pi account but doesn’t bring up an on screen keyboard, can’t get past this step

I tried a 2nd time - re-wrote the image and restarted my Mark 2 and the issue didn’t appear this time. Happy days.

[update] it is responding to ‘Hey Mycroft’ but it’s not obvious from the screen that it has woken up and is listening. Hitting the button on top makes the screen have a highlighted border.

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The hey mycroft should do the same?!?

We will investigate it.:+1:t2:

Thank tou very much for keep poking at it and reporting back.:muscle:t2:

It’s the least I can do … you’ve made my Mark 2 very useful.

A video presentation @AIIX gave a few months back at the KDE academy explaining OpenVoiceOS.

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Having a fully local on embedded device STT utilizing the OpenAI Whisper model inferenced using the Tensorflow Lite Runtime, just as the Precise Lite Wake word.

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We took the time to blog about OpenVoiceOS - Buildroot edition. So for the people that would like to have a short introduction of what it is all about;

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Kinda rubbed me the wrong way that someone is asking about MK2 (arrival) in the stream. Should be made absolutely clear that these are not issues remotely in ovos realm of influence.

Blog post - The History Of OVOS

We have a new blog post up, check it out and learn a bit about OVOS’s history!

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ovos-core 0.0.7 was just released!

full changelog: Release Release 0.0.7 · OpenVoiceOS/ovos-core · GitHub

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Will you be uploading a new image to your google drive? (or do I need to get to grips with doing it myself). Thanks.

The Buildroot-based image hasn’t been updated since January, but will be updated very soon, now that 0.0.7 is out. In the meantime, there are more current Manjaro-based images available here.

OVOS-Buildroot takes a long time to build, as you’ve discovered, and we don’t have it on CI/CD yet. Most of the time, building the system means tying up @j1nx’s hardware. Our most recently successful fundraising target was to provide a better build system. Once we’ve done that, we should be able to provide images as often as we desire. A “nightly” option might not be out of the question. However, we’re at least a few weeks from seeing that come to fruition, as we’re still at the paperwork stage of becoming a legal entity.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

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No apology needed! I appreciate your efforts.

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Can someone explain the difference between using the Buildroot-based image vs. the Manjaro-based image?

Especially regarding how well each will support the Mark 2 Dev Kit hardware, and how well each will be supported and able to be upgraded going forward?

A comprehensive answer to this question is in the works. Our documentation team is just coming together. This is my personal take, but others might put it differently. At the bottom, I’ll link to a feature chart at our technical docs, which describes them thusly:

OpenVoiceOS ready to use images come in several flavours; The buildroot version, being the minimal consumer type of image and the Manjaro version, being the full distribution easy / easier for developing. a headless raspbian image is also maintained by the community

The Buildroot-based image is the original OpenVoiceOS from way back at the top of this thread. It is

  • lightweight
  • Pi-first, including the Mark II (several OVOS devs were testing on the Mk2 SDKv1 for a long time, and some still are)
  • very much an appliance

The Manjaro-based image is a full-featured Manjaro-ARM spin, also configured to run on a Pi-based smart speaker, and also supporting the Mark II. It’s quite a bit heavier than the Buildroot image, but, being a full OS, it’s the easier place to start tinkering.

Finally, the Buildroot-based system takes a long time to build. For that reason, the image linked on our site is currently outdated. Our most recent fundraising target was a budget for a buildserver, and was successful, but we’re still in the process of incorporating. Once that happens, we expect to go from extremely infrequent updates to extremely frequent.

We’re too young to have developed an LTS policy, but we have no plans to retire either system. Rather, once OVOS is incorporated, and we’re finished with the current round of expansion, our capacity for user support will be greatly improved. Different members of the core team are principally responsible for each, and the tricky work is usually about the hardware rather than the operating system, so we haven’t found much difficulty in maintaining the two.

I realize this doesn’t actually offer much in the way of guidance, and I’m sorry for that. Both systems are meant to support the whole OVOS stack, so it’s tough to say, “Use that one.” Here’s that feature chart, covering our speaker images, a couple of our downstream friends’ images, and MycroftAI’s.

https://openvoiceos.github.io/ovos-technical-manual/comparison/

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@ChanceNCounter Thank you for the amazing reply. That is exactly what I was looking for.

It sounds like the Manjaro-based build is just what I want, as my goal is to tinker, and the Buildroot-based system has been constraining.

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Hello @Michael_McCloud , I’m trying do to the same, just on a RPI3, but with the Adafruit voice bonnet. Could you please share how you managed to install it on OVOS? I have the following error message:

error: externally-managed-environment

× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.

    If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.

    For more information visit http://rptl.io/venv

note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.

Thanks!

With bookworm you need to create a venv