This seems super weird to me, but I’ve installed ground control on my RPi3B, and it starts up fine, but doesn’t show a cursor?
Is that by design? Should I be using arrow keys or something?
What platform (Linux?) are you using?
This is a bug in kivy, it’s designed for a touchscreen. There is a config option
to make the cursor visible, but I don’t remember where it is (it’s a kivy config
option, not a ground control thing)
Try this - in the ~/.kivy/config.ini of Linux or macOS, find the setting show_cursor and set it to 1
[graphics]
show_cursor = 1
he says Raspberry Pi, so I would assume Raspian.
David Lang
The config file has show_cursor = 1 by default. Should I change it to 0?
I don’t have money for a touchscreen. Is there a version of ground control that doesn’t use kivy?
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Oops, no that wasn’t the right one, sorry. Are you using Kivypi, or a different destroyer disto? Try a search here on the forum for ‘Kivy cursor’ to see other posts which may help. Folks are running it with a mouse, but with various approaches.
I originally tried KiviPie, but it hasn’t been updated in more than a year, and it has hardcoded wifi credentials so it really was unworkable.
I then went with the latest Raspbian and installed kivi on it following the instructions at:
https://kivy.org/docs/installation/installation-rpi.html
which is where I am at.
See if this post helps. Searching the forum for ‘Kivy cursor’ would be good to do.
No try this one.
there are also alternate instructions to a diffrent solution here too:
Thank you
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No, but try the config option mentioned above, that is supposed to tell kivy
that it’s not using a touchscreen and should show the mouse pointer.
If you have a working Kivy install. You can simply try to give it an environmental variable when launching on the command line, like this from inside X window enviornment.
KIVY_WINDOW=sdl2 python main.py
Also, after doing my initial calibration and running some test cuts successfully on the RPi 3b, I have since moved on to running GC on an x86 Chromebook with Crouton (Ubuntu Linux in a jailed root).
As much as I enjoyed tinkering with the Pi, I found that if I enabled the experimental GL video driver, I gained very good graphics performance running Kivy, but lost stability. If I used the default video driver which renders screen in software, stability was better, but performance was very slow and CPU intensive.
Without a touchscreen, I think @Bee headless solution for RPi3 is an option and I briefly toyed with running ChliPeppr GRBL workspace, where the Raspberry Pi runs a JSON server that accepts the G-code over the network, buffers the file and then feeds it to the arduino.
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