ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array HAT Mycroft A.I. Skill

j1nx · April 17, 2019, 8:29am

@suisat and @gez-mycroft First of all, my apologies for my late response / abscence. Momentarily it is rather busy with my daytime job, so haven’t much played with mycroft, nor being active online.

First things first;

This plugin was quickly, let say “blind” coded without any Python knowledge what so ever. I just saw @Dominik his Skill for the ReSpeaker V2 box and looking at his code I discovered that the Python libraries it used, already had everything in place for the “other” MIC arrays. That code also was properly commented, so it looked like a quick revamp to get it working on the 4-MIC array. Apparently is isn’t

I still don’t have much / any time to investigate or fix / adjust, but here are my thoughts on the above testing and information.

With the commands here I think I bring it to run. I am running that skill on a RPi3B+ with Picroft stable.

Yes, this is what I already expected some what. These commands can be added to a “requirements.sh” next to the “requirements.txt” file. Similar as this one from @Dominik ;

github.com

domcross/respeaker-io-skill/blob/master/requirements.sh

#!/bin/bash

# mraa libs are now added in the local skill folder
#sudo apt-get -y install python3-mraa=1.9.0 libmraa1=1.9.0
sudo apt-get -y install python3-mraa libmraa1
sudo usermod -a -G input respeaker
exit 0

However the first command; “mycroft-pip install RPi.GPIO” should be removed and added to the “requirements.txt” file instead;

pixel-ring
gpiozero
RPi.GPIO

I don’t know if both; “gpiozero” and “RPi.GPIO” are needed, or that I made a mistake and “gpiozero” needs to be changed to “RPi.GPIO”

Then on to the strangest thing of all, you needed to type this into another terminal / python CLI;

from pixel_ring import pixel_ring
from gpiozero import LED
power = LED(5)
power.on()
pixel_ring.set_brightness(10)
pixel_ring.wakeup()

All this code is within the Skill init.py file as shown here;

github.com

j1nx/respeaker-4mic-hat-skill/blob/master/init.py

# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
#
# All credits go to domcross (Github https://github.com/domcross)

import time

from mycroft.messagebus.message import Message
from mycroft.skills.core import MycroftSkill, intent_handler
from adapt.intent import IntentBuilder
from mycroft.util.log import LOG

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So it looks like the code within the Skill is not properly loaded or initialised. I have no clue why as I don’t know Python yet.

What I can think of is that, perhaps the Skill initialisation fails because I deleted the " settingsmeta.json" ?!?! The content of it looked like only placeholders, so deleted it. It does not do much yet, but considering that you apparantly also can enable/disable the pixelring by commands, hence toggling it is needed to get stuff working, perhaps this file need to be there as well ?

Perhaps @forslund can have a look, if that could be the cause of it. Or perhaps you could test it by creating the file with the following content, similar as @Dominik ;

github.com

domcross/respeaker-io-skill/blob/master/settingsmeta.json

{
    "skillMetadata": {
        "sections": [
            {
                "name": "Options << Name of section",
                "fields": [
                    {
                        "name": "internal_python_variable_name",
                        "type": "text",
                        "label": "Setting Friendly Display Name",
                        "value": "",
                        "placeholder": "demo prompt in the input box"
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "name": "Login << Name of another section",
                "fields": [
                    {
                        "type": "label",

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So far, my ideas and thoughts. Hope to start cracking with Mycroft again any time soon now…