So I have been spending most of the day, getting the Control Center program to work on Raspbian, and installed with the normal Sensor installer script (AKA, you can use the Pi as a sensor AND controller by default).
The dependencies are annoying, and matplotlib kept on failing to plot live graphs… 4 hours later I found out it’s some glitch in the version of numpy that was installed. Long story short, getting the latest version fixed it.
python3 -m pip install -U numpy
It takes a pretty long time to update it this way on the Raspberry Pi Zero W, but I would rather that, then making the install process more complicated for the user.
I’m doing final testing now, to make sure the single command line to install is working with no additional steps. Once I get this working, I’ll probably release another version.
*Few hours later*
So the Raspbian installer script appears to work fairly well! It installs both the sensor programs and the control center, then all dependencies and rebuilds the latest numpy. It also puts a shortcut to the control center on the desktop of the pi user, for easy opening. I set the first IP as the localhost 127.0.0.1 by default and checked it. This makes it so you can start testing things right away on the local unit. I tested the install script on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a Sense HAT and a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a EnviroPHAT. The 3B+ went MUCH faster, and functioned pretty well … things worked just fine on the Pi Zero… but slow… just opening the Control Center takes about 30 seconds. Still, it does function decently once its loaded, so it will make a good fall back way to test things.
To give a bit of a timeframe to the slowness, I’m pretty sure it took about 2 hours on the pi zero one time, just to finish the install, most spent rebuilding the python3 numpy module. I’m hoping to fix this easier in the future, by creating a virtual pip environment with specific versions.
Since I changed the install script to download a zip of all the files, then unzip it locally, its WAY FASTER! It also seems less prone to network glitches. Besides being faster, it also helps with sending less data, since the zip file uses compression.
Lots more to enhance, but things are coming along nicely.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!
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