I saw a pico build repo in the github - just curious what the status of that is. Being able to use picos for workers at least would be great, given the Pi shortages.
Also, following up on that, I’d be very interested to know what luck people have had running the image on alternative SBCs. I have a Le Potato and a Renegade I am planning to try out, but haven’t yet.
Hi @chri-s,
The pico-build is an active project. On the Pioreactor HAT is an RP2040 chip (the same chip in a Raspberry Pico), and the repo contains the code that is loaded to the chip on boot. The chip’s purpose is to act as an ADC and DAC.
Having the entire Pioreactor run off a Pico would be fun, but I think would be a major regression. Quality of life tools like plugins, logging, software updates, etc. just wouldn’t work or be limited.
A medium-term goal is to generalize the Pioreactor images to other SBCs. Off the top of my head, I think the hard requirements an SBC must have are:
Some Python Pioreactor internals would need to change (Ex: RPi.GPIO, and some adafruit libraries maybe).
But also, a recent update from the RPi foundation: Raspberry Pi CEO: ‘Million-Unit Months’ Are Ahead | Tom's Hardware
TLDR: lots of inventory coming this month (June), and remaining high beyond that.
Makes sense, I thought it would be a bit much for a Pico. I’m glad to hear RPi supply should be increasing…it would be nice to just use some 3s or Zeros for running these!
I made a first try at porting the leader image to the Le Potato - it boots at least, but I haven’t given the HAT a try. There is a wiring tool that might help port things, but that might be a project for later: GitHub - libre-computer-project/libretech-wiring-tool