@j1nx Thanks for the link!
@AIIX I think your points are very valid, yet at the same time, @clintonthegeek and @jmillerv 's point also still stand. In all likelihood an expanded Dinkum (even though it appears it will be with new developers) will be the future of the official version of Mycroft, so I believe we must start and do what we can starting now to port and create Dinkum skills. It is very likely that the additional facilities you point out are missing will be made available in time. The alternative projects are fantastic, more power to everyone (that is a strength of FLOSS IMO), but we will continue to need the official Dinkum to achieve full robustness to achieve Mycroft overall project commercial viability.
Very much doubt it will happen, but given all the community feedback, wouldn’t it be good to at least consider ditching dinkum as a failed experiment and resume work on classic core?
They say its not maintainable and full of bugs, but the reality is that Neon was built on top of it, Chatterbox was built on top of it, OVOS was built on top of it… Neon in particular has extensive unittests to validate the code is working as intended. Thats 3 projects already that were founded on classic core.
If you include classic core itself with all the community feedback claiming it works better, thats 4 projects proving the rationale for dinkum is not fully accurate
Disclaimer: I may not be fully neutral in my opinion as I have worked or continue working very closely with all the above mentioned projects, including classic core
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The dinkum dev showed up on reddit a few days ago. He basically said that the team could never get a production quality device out of classic-core which is why he was asked to build dinkum out. He then stripped out anything that wasn’t necessary to get the device to work with the basic skills.
I honestly think this is a dead project. I have spent a lot of time this week researching the state of affairs with Mycroft and it does not look good. I am going to move on with either Neon or OVOS and hope either they end up building a vibrant community or that Mycroft is able to pull themselves out of the mess they are in.
As I see it here are their issues:
- The dinkum devs are gone.
- The founders are gone.
- The community of devs is beyond pissed because Mycroft stripped a lot of things they relied on for their skills for the Dinkum build.
- The Mycroft dev community is shrinking and those that are staying are mostly not willing to work on porting the skills to Dinkum.
- I am tired of saying/typing ‘Dinkum’.
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The good news is, that SJ-201 hat is The Bomb.
That workable image / OS will come one way or the other. Either from Mycroft or someone else. That is the power of FOSS
Eventually that “box” can and will do some crazy cool things😉
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That’s an easy PR to make. I’ll add it to the readme of each of those skills tonight/this weekend. Good call.
I’ll also start a contributor section of the repo.
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After reading many of the comments, I second, third, forth … the questions.
But I have a few of questions of my own.
First, I built my own mycroft using a Raspberry pi4, 7in touch screen, eyetoy 3, and using an aux to audio cable hooked up to a stereo for sound.
The software I am using is Ubuntu 20.04 as the base,
added the kde neon unstable repos and apt update/upgrade from their.
git clone and cd into the mycroft-core/gui and dev_setup from them and all is working fine.
Even have squeezelite loaded and running, and mimic3, and at one time also had the Squeezebox/LMS server and motion server running at the same time on the same pi.
Yes, sometimes, with all running, it was slow. (Took motion and LMS server off later after some advice from a friend).
My questions are,
- Why not just build this setup and image it from their after all is up and running/working.
- I’m not a developer, but I can follow directions, and google code when needed, but with the daughter board and camera, would these be too hard to load into Ubuntu?
As with the new dinkum system, will it be able to run on my current setup, if the mycroft-core becomes outdated?
Sorry, can not afford $500 for a mark II system, or I would test out updates, ports.
Also, from what I have read, isn’t the neon ai, ovos, and bigscreen plasma systems following the mycroft-core system, and isn’t the core already modular?
Just my thoughts. Like I said, I’m not a developer or programmer. I could be wrong in some of my assumptions. I only know html and css.
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I can answer the modularity question
tldr, ovos-core is modular, mycroft-core is not, it could be but Dinkum was what we got instead of a backwards compatible refactor like in ovos
mycroft-core is a monolithic application, to run any of the components you need the full stack installed. For example to run the messagebus service, you need all the audio pipeline installed too. This can become quite messy if you want to treat components as optional, such as running a server without the speech client or in docker.
ovos-core untangled the code and made sure every component can be run standalone without the dependencies of the other components, ovos-core is also considered a python library (its on pypi!) you can use in your own projects.
Neon is built on top of ovos-core as a library, Plasma Bigscreen also adopted ovos-core recently instead of mycroft-core
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What surprises me looking back over the past few days is that I’ve not seen a single comment from anyone at Mycroft and a fair number of comments from people from Neon and OVOS.
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It’s the week of Christmas and / to New Years eve.
A lot of companies are closed and a lot of people are off, spending it with love ones.
Give it another week.
True but searching this forum I can only see two posts in the whole month of December from anyone with ‘-mycroft’ in their user name.
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Also true 
I don’t know, all we can do is wait and see. If all the Mycroft servers go down, I guess we went the complete other way. 
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I said I’d create a contributions section. I started a discussion on standards in the repo Skill Porting Standards · Discussion #1 · jmillerv/mycroft2-skills · GitHub
If people aren’t on github, I’d appreciate a reply here on how good contribution.md files. I’ve never maintained a collaborative repo before. Also, some good links to community accepted ways of doing python. A lot of my preferences and practices come from Go and PHP but I’d prefer to start with what people who use Python full time do.
Based on everything I’m seeing so far, I think it’s highly likely I end up doing work on Ovos or Neon but I’d like to give the 1st party stack an earnest shot. I don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to developing (few hours a week at most) but many hands make light work.
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They are working some. I’ve seen Kris(gex-mycroft) in the forums and chat.
Thank you for your effort so far.
I’m not a developer perse, but once I get the two MkIIs I ordered, I’ll be able to help in some sort of way for sure.
I’m thinking of setting up each with a different OS, and compare…
Yeah, I kind of wish I had a second one to compare Neon AI against without rebooting and swapping USBs.
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@jmillerv, I just checked in with our team and we’ve got a couple of Mark II dev kits from our work the last few years that we are not using now. Could you put one of those to good use?
To be clear, you’ll need to assemble the dev kit, its in-house 3-D printed housing isn’t white, and Daniel says the LED lights may not act exactly the same as the production Mark II. In all other ways it is the same, so it would give you a second machine for development and testing.
A robust community with multiple open source operating systems for the Mark II is our goal. Supporting your work in the Mark II Neon / OVos / Mycroft community in this way seems like a good use of our resources in support of that goal.
If you would find the dev kit useful just let me know and I will send it to the same address as your Neon AI OS boot drive.
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Hi, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
I’m just seeing this. Been catching up at work from the holiday break. I could definitely put it to good use and would immediately start working with Neon on it. I’ve got some time off coming up and am hoping to use a bit of it for my open source work.
My tomorrow goal is to finish converting that Sing skill.
Thank you so much!
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Glad to hear it! I’ll send it your way though it may not go out until Monday.
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No worries. Tonight, I’m going to try and implement one of my suggestions into the bark skill I converted.
Thank you so much!