enclosure picroft

It's Alive!

Picroft - Buster Keaton (Pork Pi) release

Picroft is an enclosure for a Raspberry Pi 3, 3B+ or 4 connected to a speaker and microphone, bringing Mycroft to anyone who wants a simple voice interface they have complete control over. This is built on top of the official Raspbian Buster Lite image.

The entire project is available as a pre-built micro-SD image ready to be burned and placed into a Raspberry Pi. You can download the pre-built image here:

Picroft Stable 2020-09-07 image

SHA-256: 3d3c99c53793224b84de02e816435230f2bbe6272b71d8909afee43e5ef9a402

Picroft Release Candidate 2021-06-04 image

SHA-256: 2d5a81375036a1dc4ce30051ea9e9181f4019c8f61264db3a43d87d03df854a6

A list of current and past releases can be found at: https://downloads.mycroft.ai/releases/picroft/

Optionally you can build it yourself by following the Recipe for building the image

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 3, 3B+, or 4
  Older Raspberry Pi versions do not have sufficient processing power, and if they work they will be very slow
• Speaker
  Any analog speaker, or an HDMI monitor with speaker
• Microphone
  A list of Community tested hardware is available in our documentation.
• 2.5 Amp or better power supply
  Don't skimp on this! It might appear to work, but you'll have weird issues with a cheapo supply.
• MicroSD Card
  8 GB or larger
• HDMI Monitor and keyboard, only required during setup

Installation

1. Download and burn the image to the SD card.
   See the RaspberryPi.org's guide to Installing Operating System Images for detailed instructions on how to burn an image to your SD card.
2. Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi
3. Connect speaker, microphone, monitor and keyboard
4. Apply power
5. Follow the on-screen prompts to setup Picroft
6. Follow the verbal prompts to pair your device to an account at Mycroft Home
7. Talk to Mycroft and enjoy!

Usage

Simply speak to Picroft as you would to any Mycroft. For example:

"Hey Mycroft, what time is it?"
"Mycroft, how tall was Abraham Lincoln?"

Older Versions

• Raspbian Jessie version

Help and more info

To re-run the setup wizard, use mycroft-setup-wizard. Check out the Picroft wiki here. There's also the general Documentation.

Customization

• audio_setup.sh configures your specific audio setup.
• custom_setup.sh is a stub meant to initialize anything before Mycroft starts. For example, initializing connected devices, or launching services.

Getting Help

There is an active Picroft community within the Mycroft's Mattermost chat which all are welcome to join!

---

FAQ

Q1) Why "Buster Keaton (Pork Pi)"?

This image is built on top of Raspbian "Buster" for running on a Raspberry Pi.

Buster Keaton is best known for his silent films, but also his signature Pork Pie hats that he designed and made himself. Coincidentally, Buster Keaton's classic film "Safety Last!" came out of copyright in 2019.

The photo at the top of this page we thought was Buster Keaton wearing his signature hat. It turns out that it is actually a slightly more contemporary Harold Lloyd.

Q2) Can I run this with a the Raspbian desktop GUI?

Sadly, not really. A Raspberry Pi is powerful, but still not well suited to do everything at once. You can add other basic services on top of Picroft, but the desktop GUI requires too many additional resources and neither Mycroft nor the GUI end up running well.

Q3) Can I run this with anything else?

Depends on what you want to add. Serving simple webpages or polling devices periodically is probably fine. Mining bitcoin won't.

Q4) Can I run this on a Pi4?

Yes!