I am working on a project that has already been developed on the Raspberry Pi OS, latest version. I only recently discovered Pi-top, and I love the hardware, all except it being proprietary.
I would love to be able to access the buttons and the display using python3 if possible. If not I’ll sadly have to limit how much I promote pi-top for the contest I’m putting together.
I’m all about FOSS and inspiring people to build through sharing, one of the primary aspects of the forthcoming contest. I’ve already announced the top prize, which is a pi-top Raspberry Pi 4 w/8GB RAM, so pi-top will at least get that much exposure.
I’m just here looking for technical details I can use to build an even better 1st prize by programming some cool things that use the display & buttons.
Any help, guidance or suggestions anyone is willing to reply with would be greatly appreciated.
Step 1: Adding the pi-topOS software repository
First, you need to tell your pi-top how to install software from pi-top.
Open up a terminal window in Raspberry Pi OS, and type the following into a terminal:
echo "deb http://apt.pi-top.com/pi-top-os sirius main contrib non-free" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pi-top.list &> /dev/null
curl https://apt.pi-top.com/pt-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add
This will provide your Raspberry Pi with information about pi-top’s software server, including the security key.
Step 2: Update package list
Now you will need to refresh your Raspberry Pi’s local copy of what software is available from the servers that it knows about.
Type the following into a terminal:
sudo apt update
You are now able to install pi-top software packages!
Step 3: Install software packages
Type the following into a terminal:
Lastly, there is an educational tool called Further that can also help you out too. The feature on further, Further link does not work on Raspberry Pi OS at this time i have found.
An absolutely awesome and complete answer, thank you sir!
The only reservation may be the 32 bit limitation you mentioned. I’ll look over the git repo and see what we can use. Greatly appreciate your thorough reply.
there will be 64bit support when Raspberry Pi 64bit is officially released out of beta
I am actually working on a script to automate everything to install the SDK depending on the version of Raspberry Pi OS and just testing it on the different versions before making a post about it
@Armando do you have more details of the competition you are running? Sounds fun!
Most of the software that runs on pi-top [4] is open-source, you can check our GitHub. The reason not all of our repos are public isn’t that we want to hide anything (most is in Python and readable on the OS anyway!), we just want to ensure that they are clearly documented and structured properly so that they are actually useful to people before making them public. This takes some time but over 2021 we have been actively pursuing this and have made excellent progress - it sounds like everything you need is already public and very well documented anyway
Finally, all hardware to some extent is “proprietary” (even elements of the Raspberry Pi itself), but we’re generally very open about discussing and documenting any details that are important to users being able to do what they want with it - just let us know if you need any support!
@CAProjects How’s the progress? A year ago I bought a pi-top4 diy for my Pi 4 (8GB). Unfortunately for the Debian system (64bit) there are no display or battery control packages available. Will it be available? Wait patiently or look for another solution?
Best wishes!
At some point in the future, we aim to do arm64 builds of all of our packages that require compilation, but all other packages can be theoretically installed onto any system and should work the same.
The only issue that you may run into is that the packages may require some dependencies that are currently not packaged for arm64 (e.g. our upstream Debian package builds from PyPI).
