I’m updating an old Sonic Pi project (GitHub - jarkman/world-o-techno: Location-based techno with Sonic Pi and gpsd) and need to move it to new hardware.
I tried it on a Zero W, with sad results. I can’t find any documentation about which Pi boards will actually run the current Sonic Pi release, and I don’t want to have to determine that by experiment. Can I use some of my dusty old Pis ? Do I need to buy a shiny new one ?
Any clues would be very welcome.
I think the surest , simplest , bet would be to use the version
of SPi that worked with the OS used with it . I . E …
Use the version from the repository available on your booted
up RPi …
Thanks - there are going to be several copies of this, and that would result in a hodgepodge of different versions on different Pis which would give me a different set of versioning headaches with the other software that has to run on them. I really just want to run the up-to-date Sonic Pi on everything.
I think you can run the sp 4.3 deb on a 1Mb RPI 3B and newer running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS. I checked using my Pi 3B. On the Pi 2 (1Mb) I think it will be too turgid, and I have had some trouble getting things to run which I am still checking. Looking at your project it is fairly ancient. (I wrote the autoboot code you refer to AutoBoot for telegram and Sonic Pi Jukebox | rbnrpi) and this will certainly be out of date with the newer OS. Also the sonic-pi-cli (first version ) won;’ work and the newer version on the Widdershin site wont work with SP 4 and onwards s this requires an internal security token and dynamically allocated port. I have a bodged version that will work which I call sonic-pi-cli4 The latest version of SP 4.4 is ONLY available on 64bit at present as some of the code wont run on 32bit. It will run on a Pi3B with SP but not very well. OK on a Pi4.
For an older Pi you could consider running using the supported legacy Raspbery Pi OS which is based on Debian Buster. This won’t run latest SP but should be OK with say SP 3.3.1 which should be OK for your project. I haven’t tried it but am taking a look at it.
EDIT
I can confirm that SP 3.3.1 downloaded from the SP github site works on the legacy Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi2. However it is quite taxing if you have complex sounds on SP and I would recommend using RPI 3B 1Mb or newer spec. However if you have a 2B worth giving it a try.
Robin - many thanks - that is super-helpful. I will digest it some more in the morning.
Are you saying that there’s no sensible way to autostart Sonic Pi 4.4 (if I went for new Pis to run on) ? Or is your bodged version up to it ?
Actually, I think the method still works to modify the autostart file in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi
Also, if using a version 4 Sonic Pi you can install my version of the sonic-pi-cli using
sudo gem install sonic-pi-cli4
Use sonic_pi4 to use it rather than sonic_pi
you can use the original sonic-pi-cli for version of SP < 4
Disclaimer. The sonic_cli4 command extracts info from the log files to get the token and dynamic port. This is NOT officially supported in Sonic Pi and may very well change in future versions.
Fabulous. I’ll have a go. Many thanks.