Historically, we’ve defaulted to a “head-less” Pioreactor, where no monitor is attached to the Pioreactor and you use another computer to interact. The reason was that peripherals like a monitor or mouse can eat up a lot of power, and the Pioreactor is already pretty power-hungry.
We believe that with an recommended power supply, and an RPi 4B or above, there’s enough compute and power to attach a “head” to the Pioreactor.
We’ve developed a beta image that includes the Raspberry Pi desktop, and enables displays and peripherals. If you’re interested in testing this, email me at cam@pioreactor.com
Actually the RPi 400 is a great use case, and part of the RPi4 line up. Let me polish up the source code a bit first and then I’ll send you a link (our beta images target the develop branch of our software, and things are a bit messy atm).
Oh, I think I know what happened. In my previous tests, I was using a 32 bit architecture, and for this latest release, I decided to use a 64 bit. However, our openocd was compiled on a 32 bit architecture, and we need openocd to write to the firmware for i2c stuff. But it fails when run on a 64 bit architecture.
Why 64 bit anyways? I figure that RPi4 & 5 & 400s have more memory, so we can take advantage of that and offer the 64 bit software (which is generally more performant).
Much better! Three tests are still failing, but I’m not sure if it’s something with my Pioreactor or whether it’s related to the nightly release. I’ll have to revert to the production release to see if the tests still fail. Adding my logs in case you want to have another look:
Three tests are still failing, but I’m not sure if it’s something with my Pioreactor or whether it’s related to the nightly release. I’ll have to revert to the production release to see if the tests still fail. Adding my logs in case you want to have another look: