Installer trouble with the Unicorn Hat HD

Support
1

Hi. Today we started to experiment with our “straight out of the box” Unicorn hat HD. We also had a brand new Pi Zero W and a loaded an 8Gb SD card with the Jessie Lite image. After getting it started up, connected to WiFi, updated (Took ages… ) etc, we powered off, attached unicorn hat HD, powered up and then SSH onto the pi so to use the PC browser to copy links over from the support page.

curl https://get.pimoroni.com/unicornhathd | bash

After another long install it was ready and a quick explore into the “examples” folder, followed by a “python demo.py” and WOW!! Amazing!! It’s alive.
Then we started trying a few other examples when we ran into trouble. Some of the examples use “pillow” which needed to be installed, as shown by the helpful exception handler. So a cheeky -

sudo pip install pillow

  • was issued, which resulted in a crash out of the installer. After a lot of googling, head scratching, and coffee, the solution presented itself. I tried manually installing the packages and this revealed that python-dev was not installed. Once it was then pillow also installed. However the text.py still did not fly. This was the fonts not being installed. So after inspecting the code I saw the option to install fonts-droid, which I did, modified the code and result.

So possibly a bit of a feature with the automatic setup process.

However, the Unicorn hat HD is a very cool device!! Thanks for creating it.

2

Thanks for this I just had the same problem. For those of you, who like me are less tech savvy, these are the exact steps to get this working:

  1. sudo apt-get install python-dev
  2. sudo pip install pillow
  3. sudo apt-get install fontconfig
  4. sudo apt-get install fonts-freefont-ttf
  5. sudo apt-get install fonts-droid
  6. sudo apt-get install fonts-roboto

fontconfig isn’t required but is nice to have and you only have to install fronts-freefont-ttf to get the examples working. fonts-droid and fonts-roboto are used for other examples that I’ve noticed in the code.

I just spent a lot longer than I would have liked figuring this out (n00b!) and would love to see it as an option in the pimoroni-dashboard install (do you want to install necessary dependencies for all examples to work?)