Requirements, installation and setup

These installation notes are based on a new build of Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) Lite. They should work on any build of Raspberry Pi OS.

These notes assume that after the build and first boot, apt update and apt upgrade have been run as well as the usual first setup tasks (password change, network setup, etc.)

Preparation / Requirements

This software uses a couple of modules from my "utils" repository - the easiest way to install is using git:

sudo apt install git python3-distutils python3-setuptools

then:

git clone https://github.com/pootle/pootles_utils.git
cd pootles_utils
sudo python3 setup.py install
cd ~/

A recent version of pigpio is required (one that supports wave_create_and_pad). The current (August 2020) Raspberry Pi OS repositories don't have a recent enough version. If the app fails with The installed version of pigpio does not support wave_create_and_pad. Please update. Follow the simple instructions on this web page.

It also makes life easier to set pigpio to run automatically on boot:

sudo systemctl enable pigpiod

Note this only runs the pigpio daemon after a reboot, to run the app before a reboot:

sudo systemctl start pigpiod

Installation of pisteppers

Just clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/pootle/pisteppers.git

The configuration files

There are two configuration files:

1. config_full.py For initial testing this file can be left unchanged.

2. a json file that specifies the motors to be driven, the gpio pins associated with them and some parameters on how they are to be driven. There are several example files. This Motor Definition Quickstart provides info to quickly modify an appropriate file.

See The motor definition file for all the gory details.