Missing directories in install

[sneakers-the-rat]

Submitted in discussion board:
https://groups.google.com/g/autopilot-users/c/HUCdRJJ-Sg4/m/ag3rwzYABQAJ

Minor issues I observed where that I ran (in both the “pure” pip install and the pip install from the repo) into the error of a missing dir under ‘./autopilot/external/pigpio’ which could be solved by simply creating the dir. Also, git-cloning the ‘wehr-lab’ repo missed the contents for both folders in the src which I added by hand. Afterwards the installation was successful and I ran the setup script also without errors (not caring about disabling bluetooth for now)

[cxrodgers]

Thanks for these hints. They helped me get going too. I'm using a brand-new raspberry pi 4B with latest version of raspbian. I had a few additional issues, which may be related to using a newer pi or just that I haven't had any previous versions installed.

First I had to install some dependencies manually. They're listed at the bottom of the installation documentation, but I didn't notice this until later.

sudo apt install build-essential cmake git python3-dev libatlas-base-dev libsamplerate0-dev libsndfile1-dev libreadline-dev libasound-dev i2c-tools libportmidi-dev liblo-dev libhdf5-dev libzmq-dev libffi-dev libdb-dev libsystemd-dev
The last two were not in the documentation but I needed them (or maybe they would have been installed by something else).

Here's how I cloned everything to get around the missing links issue. I cloned into a directory called ~/dev/autopilot, not sure if the doc assumes you clone into ~/autopilot?

mkdir ~/dev
cd ~/dev
git clone https://github.com/wehr-lab/autopilot
git clone https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/pigpio autopilot/src/pigpio
git clone https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/mlx90640-library autopilot/src/mlx90640-library

Now to install:

cd autopilot # this line is missing from installation webpage
pip3 install --user -e .

Ok so that should work, except what I actually had to do is sudo pip3 install -e .. I could not install both editable and user at the same time, I think it's related to this recent issue in pip:
pypa/pip#7953

I don't like to pip install with sudo, so I might try to get the fix on that issue page working before proceeding.

[sneakers-the-rat]

OK this should be fixed in v0.3.2, the pr linked above.

• clarified the documentation -- there are some system dependencies that need to be installed before the autopilot configuration is run, so I just put them all up front (and also made an option to install them in the configuration menus)
• the expectation of those directories was a hangover from a previous way i had intended to do packaging, so removed that. pigpio should be installed from requirements now.

thanks for your notes on documentation, really appreciated.

permissions on the pi can be weird -- i can never tell if you need to --user out of an installation or not. Yes you should use --user if you dont want an editable install, and i would encourage using a venv if you want an editable install :).

i'll close for now, but reopen if issue persists.