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Installing MPF on a Raspberry Pi 3

MPF can be installed on a Raspberry Pi 4, and possibly a 3.

MPF itself runs fine, but you might run into limitations with the Media Controller since videos and sounds can potentially take more resources than the Pi has. (You can address this by tuning the codecs and configuration of your Pi, or, you can just buy a more powerful NUC or single-board computer for $100-200 and then never have to worry about performance again.)

  • Get the latest Raspberry Pi Imager from here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
  • Install Raspbian Lite onto your SD card.
  • Boot your PI and connect keyboard + monitor
  • Login with user:pi password:raspberry
  • now type this:
sudo raspi-config

and choose 7. Advanced Options -> A1. Expand Filesystem to use the whole SD-Card Space, we will need it. You can change your username and localization settings too.

After that we will give the GPU a bit more of RAM:

Go to 7. Advanced Options -> A3 Memory split and change the value to 256.

Now reboot, login and type:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install git

git clone https://github.com/missionpinball/mpf-debian-installer.git
cd mpf-debian-install
sudo ./install

To checkout and run the MPF Linux Debian installer. It will install MPF, MPF-MC and all dependencies for you.

This will take some time as it may compile some drivers mpf-mc needs like the audio driver. Sometimes it looks like it hangs, but it does not. It will take up to half an hour, at least on a Raspberry 1 (which you should not use). Compiling is really slow on the Raspi.

Now copy your machine folder from your develop station or create a new one under your home directory (/home/pi/your_machine)

If you need a file-manager start mc (No, not the mpf mediacontroller, its the midnight commander ;-))

If you need to copy your folders from an usb-stick you have to manually mount it (we dont have X, so everything has to be done by hand).

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

This works in 90% otherwise your stick is not sda1, just look inside the /dev folder to find out which device you have to mount or type

lsblk

to list your block devices.

Now you find the contents of your stick in /mnt.

To tell mpf-mc and the underlying kivy to use the framebuffer via SDL2 you have to put this in your machine/config/config.yaml:

window:
  width: 1280
  height: 800
kivy_config:
  graphics:
    fbo: force-hardware
##! test
#! advance_time_and_run .1

More or less important last steps:

Serial communication:

Linux always had and has the possibility to log in via a serial connection. If you run a hardware platform which uses the serial pin on the Raspberry you should disable the Linux login shell on that port. The device is called /dev/ttyAMA0 and you need to stop it from starting:

Type:

sudo systemctl disable serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service

Now you have to disable the console itself:

sudo mc

to start Midnight Commander as root (normally you should not do this, but this time you have to.)

Now go to /boot and press F4 over cmdline.txt.

Remove these entries:

console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0, 115200

and save the file.

You have the possibility to connect RS 232 devices directly to the raspi but take care, the voltage levels are 3.3V on the raspi gpio. Further instructions here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection

Sound output:

Navigate to /boot/config.txt if you want to use audio out of the Raspberry built in ""soundcard"": edit this file as root and insert this line:

dtparam=audio=on

Inside this file you can change some settings that initialize on boot, its like a bios which the raspberry does not have.

Video Playback:

If you need video capability in your mpf-mc you need to install one player that kivy will use to play your videos:

sudo apt-get install omxplayer

You can try videoplayback with

omxplayer your_video.mp4

To test the video playback capability under kivy into the framebuffer just run this command:

python3 -m kivy.uix.videoplayer /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/mpfmc/tests/machine_files/video/videos/mpf_video_small_test.mp4

Troubleshooting:

More documentation about kivypie can be found here: http://kivypie.mitako.eu/kivy-faq.html

No sound:

If you have trouble getting sound out of your speakers or monitor have a look here:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/audio-config.md

If sound plays via omxplayer but not in MPF, set use_sdl_mixer_loader: False in your MPF configuration file.

Do a reboot:

sudo reboot

Remote log in:

To log in from your development machine into your raspberry you can do it easily via ssh. For windows I recommend putty: http://www.putty.org/

See whats going on on your pinball:

sudo dispman_vncserver

This starts a vncserver on your raspi and you can log in remotely from a RealVNCViewer https://www.realvnc.com/download/viewer/

Kivypie IP address, port 5900. It is not 100% reliable but fairly usable. Thanks to Peter Hanzel.

Start mpf and mpf-mc

To test your installation type

mpf

in your machine_folder.

Press (STRG+ALT F2) to change to the second terminal tty2.

Login and start mpf-mc inside your machine folder with

mpf mc

Enjoy!

What if it did not work?

In the following we list some common problems and solutions. If you got another problem please ask in our forum.

YAML error on first start

You will see this error if there is already a different version of ruamel.yaml installed on your system:

pkg_resources.VersionConflict: (ruamel.yaml 0.15.37 (c:\users\robert\appdata\local\programs\python\python36\lib\site-packages), Requirement.parse('ruamel.yaml<0.11,>=0.10')

This could have happened if you are upgrading to a newer version of MPF or you have incompatible versions of MPF, MPF-MC and/or the MPF-Monitor installed. The required ruamel.yaml version is different on newer MPF versions. We used to install ruamel 0.11 and switched to 0.15 in MPF 0.53+. MPF cannot start with two yaml libraries. To fix this check your versions pip3 list and check mpf, mpf-mc and mpf-monitor. Remove the wrong version and install the right one. All versions need to match (for instance all or all dev).

The following command will remove all three and install the latest release:

pip3 uninstall mpf mpf-mc mpf-monitor
pip3 install mpf mpf-mc mpf-monitor

This error can also occur if you already have ruamel.yaml installed in your python system packages for a non-MPF package. Often times, you will have a newer version of ruamel.yaml than MPF requires. Unfortunately, MPF cannot use a newer version of this package because that caused issues in the past because newer versions dropped support (wheels for windows) for older python versions. In the case that you need a different version than the one MPF requires, it is advised to create a python virtual environment and install the required packages there, and use that virtual environment for running MPF.

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