Friday December 12th

Now it’s winter! My morning walk might be extremely short today. Myer taught me recently “there are no bad days only bad clothes” but I’m not sure my clothes are up to a -14F wind chill. With two scarves maybe…

New pippi wheels

I’ve been testing some new builds of pippi for raspberry pi recently, thanks to some encouragement from Will.

According to the CI builds listed on piwheels.org, the last time there was a working wheel for raspberry pi was beta 7 in August of 2017. I’m surprised the wheel was even building then, frankly! It could have been before I added Soundpipe and some other C library dependencies which at the time were difficult to deal with when building linux wheels. I ended up giving up on it entirely and just recommending building from source when installing pippi.

Sometime earlier this year I looked into this all again and there is now a magical tool called auditwheel which can be used to make a manylinux_2_38_x86_64 wheel, whose 2_38 number indicates the version of glibc it supports. I’m using an older glibc version, which the project says should support Debian 10+, Ubuntu 18.10+, Fedora 29+ and CentOS/RHEL 8+. It would be cool to build wheels for older glibc versions at some point too. The last time I remember working on this, I think maybe the manylinux format existed, but it wasn’t possible to actually build wheels for it yet? Anyway, I was happy to see this is possible now!

This is how the pippi linux wheels are now built:

python -m build --wheel --outdir wheelhouse
auditwheel repair wheelhouse/pippi-*-linux_x86_64.whl --plat manylinux_2_38_x86_64 -w wheelhouse/

For raspberry pi wheels in particular piwheels.org just scoops up any projects published on pypi (very cool they do this, it must be a small nightmare to keep secure) and tries to build wheels across all the major debian versions used as raspbian/raspberrypi OS bases. Trixie/3.13 is now building successfully, and I’m waiting for the lastest test build to complete now, hopefully fixing issues on the older versions…

Update: hey it works! Even astrid seems to be running OK. Here is the most boring video on the internet of the pi (a compute module 4 inside clockwork pi’s uconsole enclosure) running the astrid script included below:

from pippi import dsp, fx, shapes, tune, oscs
import astrid

def play(ctx):
    freq = shapes.win('rnd', dsp.rand(100, 1000), dsp.rand(1000, 5000), length=dsp.rand(0.5, 30))
    length = dsp.rand(1,5)
    out = oscs.Pulsar2d(['rnd']*10, 
        pulsewidth=shapes.win('sine', 0.01, dsp.rand(0.1, 1), length=dsp.rand(0.1, 0.25)),
        freq=freq).play(length)
    ctx.t.cmd(dsp.rand(.1,2), 'ping p').schedule(ctx.now)
    return out.env('rnd') * dsp.rand(0.1, 0.75)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    astrid.run_forever(__file__, output_channels=2, input_channels=0)

no log for August