The Steps

WARNING: this information has been written in 2021, when pypilot version was 0.24 and Openplotter was 2.0. In 2023 these versions have by far been superceded and information in this chapter is most likely to be partly obsolete. Work in progress will be documented in the Workbook Release Notes.

The best manuals I have read that approached conceptually complex subjects from a low entry, just took the reader on a journey, starting with the simplest way to get something working. That’s what I will do here as well. I’m just calling it ‘the steps’ because it’s one step at a time.

At this point, it is good to emphasize again that this workbook was intended to learn the concepts and functionality of pypilot from the ground up, as opposed to some reference manual, or one of those fashionable how-I-did-it blog posts. If you read the chapters in the given order, and do the steps yourself in the given order, you will find that each step builds on the previous steps. If you are into this type of stuff already, you will benefit from glancing through it and make some notes; if you are new into it, I suggest you take your time to play around and really let it sink in. Only when you internalised what pypilot is, you can set off drawing your plans to build your own.

It must be said, however, that to divert from the reference architecture, you have to be from proper stock. The reference architecture is the tinypilot distribution with the hat electronics. This is the context within which development and testing takes place. Openplotter is a derivative that is seriously lagging behind, github is the source that has effectively only been tested against... tinypilot. If you think you are smart enough to do it slightly differently, you will run into challenges and you are the only one to solve it. Problems that emanate from not going by the reference architecture will not have priority by the developer; and you must understand that many of your self-induced problems are difficult to replicate. But you will not be alone - the pypilot forum harbours a lot of knowledge and some of that knowledge I have tried to consolidate in this workbook.

So these are a bit of the rules of the game to keep in the back of your mind when you go through the following steps. Even if you understand it all, it might still be a wise decision to buy the standard hardware off the pypilot.org store. It all depends on own your preferences and inclinations. Enjoy the next part of the workbook!

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Step 1: Install Openplotter Headless >>>