This week we give Mycroft Skill developers some new tools as we start a series of changes to make their lives easier, letting them focus on doing their magic and honing the Skills they want to build!
This week’s changes
mycroft.ai website
- Changed the dedicated Mark 1 page to Get Mycroft. This single page contains info on all the ways you can start interacting with Mycroft — by ordering a Mark 1, downloading the Picroft image, installing the KDE desktop plasmoid, or pulling down code directly from Github and building it yourself.
Picroft 0.8c
- A refreshed release of the Raspberry Pi image with mycroft-core 0.8.6 pre-installed. This makes the initial interaction easier (especially registering). There is no need to re-install if you already have Picroft working, the daily update mechanism will take care of you automatically.
mycroft-core 0.8.6
- Reduced the longest listening time from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. This helps in noisy situations where silence detection is not possible. PR #529
- Skill auto-reload. The Skill system now monitors the skill folders, reloading them automatically when files have changed. PR #524
- Enhanced CLI. The Command Line Interface (CLI) tool has been totally revamped. PR #536
- It now operates as a full-screen app (using curses)
- Utterances are typed in at the bottom. A history of utterances and responses is displayed immediately above.
- Filtered versions of the mycroft-voice.log and mycroft-skills.log files are shown in real-time at the top. By default, the viseme commands are filtered. Ctrl+PgUp / PgDn scrolls through the logs.
- Invoke using cli under Picroft or ./start.sh cli –quiet for a Github checkout.
- To get previous behavior (non-curses), invoke with the “–simple” parameter.
For example: ./start.sh cli –quiet –simple - More to come!
- As a one-step method for developers, running ./mycroft.sh start -d starts mycroft-core services and jumps directly into the cli for debugging/debugging. Use ./mycroft.sh stop after you exit the cli if you don’t want Mycroft to continue running in the background. PR #522
I’ve been enjoying debugging in KDE with a Skill in a text editor, the CLI running in a window next to it. I write a little code, hit Save, then can almost instantly see the Skill auto-reload in the logs. If I have a typo, I notice and fix that immediately. Then I use the CLI to test whatever I implemented. Dropping logger.debug(“”) in my code is a fast way to figure out anything going wrong, and is now easy to see. A much nicer and faster development experience!
Steve has been building cutting edge yet still highly usable technology for over 25 years, previously leading teams at Autodesk and the Rhythm Engineering. He now leads the development team at Mycroft as a partner and the CTO.