Raspberry or PC?

[Ronnie Evans]

Hi Everyone,

Its been a longtime since i setup my pytomation system and it was working just as i wanted it to. Yesterday the motherboard in the pc running it failed. So now i have to build another system and want to know if the Raspberry pi b+ is a better way to go than a pc? Also if using a raspberry can i use the GPIO form pytomation?

Thanks.

[George Farris]

Greetings,

I have had Pytomation running on a Pi2 board and it seems to run well. I am just in the process of moving to Python3 and putting that on a Pi3 board. I am using 3 serial ports and the 4 port USB serial board was I believe drawing too much power and it would start to exhibit serial errors. I am going to move it to a powered usb hub and hopefully that helps.

I think the Pi3 is a better fit if you are going to run multiple USB serial ports as they did slightly change the USB system or firmware to help, however as I say I was running it on a Pi2 board.

I will report back here with my results but I would certainly give it a go. I would suggest at this point you might think about using the Python3 branch both David and I think it runs slightly better and the next version of Python 3.x is going to be even faster from what I have read. I think Python2 will be a dead end as all further development is in the 3 branch of Python.

See this article: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3252852/python/whats-new-in-python-37.html

Cheers

George

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[Ronnie Evans]

Thanks for the reply. 

I think i will give it a try in the pi3. Still wonder if the GPIO pins are available to pytomation, if they are i probably can get by with just the pi and no arduino.

[George Farris]

Sorry forgot to answer that part. I have never tried the gpio interface and unfortunately the people that wrote that never supplied any documentation, it looks pretty simple but I would have to try it. The up side is if it doesn't work I will fix it and make sure it works with Python 3. Please try the rpi_input, we'll concentrate on that as it uses RPi.GPIO.

From the looks of the driver it doesn't follow standard Pytomation instance file format. I will have a go at changing it when I get my Pi back up and running.

Let me know if you get it going as well.

George

[Ronnie Evans]

Ok thanks. I ordered a pi today so it will be some time before I get to try it but I will post back with any results I find.

[Ronnie Evans]

I received my raspberry pi and got pytomation working on it no problem. I haven't played with the gpio yet but I saw the post about them so thank you for that I can't wait to start trying them. The major advantage I see is the tiny amount of power consumption compared to a pc.

Thanks again for all your help and hard work.

[George Farris]

Hi Ronnie,

I just pushed a change to fix a dictionary usage bug in the rpigpio
interface, you should grab that from git in the Python3 branch

George

[Ronnie Evans]

Ok thanks. I will give it a try.

[Ronnie Evans]

I got the new files from git today and gave it a try. I used the same pi with a second sd so I have a fresh os and with exception of the Google voice and the zwave stuff I got all of the dependencies installed. Then ran the install.sh script and it completed successfully. However when I run the pytomation.py script I get an error. When I try python3 pytomation.py I get no module apscheduler. When I try python2 or just python I get no module parse. I have reinstalled both apscheduler and parse.

So I guess first I should ask what version of python should I use?
And any ideas on what I might be missing?

[George Farris]

You should use python3. Look at the requirements.txt file. You will have to install pip for python3 and pip install some modules such as apscheduler.

The install.sh script is old and shouldn't be used. You can just run it as python3 ./pytomation.py from the directory you have the files in. We will fix this soon:-)

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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[David]

Note that you should install the requirements using pip3, not pip, which is for Python 2.

[Ronnie Evans]

Using pip3 to Install the requirements worked like a charm. Thanks guys.