PiFace Problems

Keith, you are not alone. The 'documentation' with the piface is worse than useless. I particularly like the typo on page 2 of the 'instructions' (etc/ which should be /etc/) and that if the emulator fails (I can't get it to work – ends with 'segmentation fault') the 'instructions' that follow are, again, useless. I will get it working in the end, but no thanks to the fools at man.ac.uk. How difficult would it have been to provide basic instructions in the box? Good luck with it - I'll reply back when I've finished arm-wrestling with it and got it doing something (I have a job in mind).

... not sure if urls are allowed here - if they are, here's some documentation for piface ...

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B-UAZ9CyJCLGQjJ3RDlqa2pqaDg/edit?pli=1

Okay. I run ure sample code, no output. Reinstalling Rasbian was my first try of troubleshooting.

Did you press switch 0? Perhaps your switch is broken? Try connecting the ground pin and pin 0 with a wire (a paperclip will do). What happens then?

Hey, i think you mean sw1 / input0, but i also try all the other switches and as i said in a earlier post "But simple polling on a button works fine. So buttons and leds are working...".  So the hardware should be fine?!. Strange that I seem to be the only one with this behavior

Hello Thomas,

I have my SD card inserted and tested in a different RPi with another PiFace. The error is thus definitely somewhere in the software configuration!

I'm going to make the Raspian completely new and write down step by step what I did. Perhaps you notice what's wrong or missing.

Thanks for your help so far!!

Sounds like a good idea. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this!

Okay that's exactly what I did, no more and no less!

• Downloading 2013-09-10-wheezy-raspbian from raspberrypi.org
• Writing Image on SD Card with win32 disk imager (v0.9)
• First boot
• Enable boot to desktop
• Reboot
• Connect via WinSCP
• Copy common 3.1.1 and digitalio 2.1.0
• Install common (sudo dpkg –i python3-pifacecommon…)
• Reboot
• Install digitalio (sudo dpkg –i python3-pifacedigital…)
• Reboot
• Lunch IDLE3
• Select  / usr/share/doc/python3-pifacedigitalio/examples/presslights.py
• Run F5
• Press the Buttons

Nothing happens. Still the same sh** :-( I'm desperate ...

It might be somethig to do with IDLE (I've never used it). Try running the program from the command line (xterm or lxterminal).

$ python3 /usr/share/doc/python3-pifacedigitalio/examples/presslights.py

yeah! That's it. Hours that I have employed you and then such an error.. big thanks!

Hi i have a piface all the pins light up on override 1-7

The piface will not recognized import piface.pfio as pfio

most programmes i have run come up with syntex error

i conected a door closer to the pin ligths up it works but relay does not swiitch

i will do fresh install piface already loaded but it has no wifi installed

any help with this it sounds a bit the same as yours

Are you using the most up-to-date libraries? You can install them with:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python{,3}-pifacedigitalio

Examples on how to use pifacedigitalio can be found here: http://piface.github.io/pifacedigitalio/example.html

Are you using the most up-to-date libraries? You can install them with:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python{,3}-pifacedigitalio

Examples on how to use pifacedigitalio can be found here: http://piface.github.io/pifacedigitalio/example.html

Hi Thomas,

I've been trying to get my piFace working.  I've been able to download and launch the piface-emulator.  Works fine.

However I'm trying to run a simple python program.  I think it's a sample but I renamed it a couple of days ago and forget which it is.

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/home/pi/piface/python/myPiface.py", line 2, in <module>

    import piface.pfio as pfio

  File "/home/pi/piface/python/piface/pfio.py", line 13, in <module>

    import spi

ImportError: No module named spi

Are you using the most up-to-date libraries? You can install them with:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python{,3}-pifacedigitalio

Examples on how to use pifacedigitalio can be found here: http://piface.github.io/pifacedigitalio/example.html

YES!  Thanks Thomas, that worked.

A quick question, in python, when I import a library, do I have to specify a directory or are all libraries centrally located?

Thanks again for your help, now I can get started :-)

Lou

All Python modules are usually installed somewhere in /usr/lib/python* but Python will check all of the locations in sys.path. Here is some more info: http://docs.python.org/3.2/tutorial/modules.html#the-module-search-path

Whoops, spoke too soon...

Edit:

I went back and tried to run my original program, still failed on spi  library. 

I simply modifed it to use pifacedigitalio and it came together so all is well. 

Is piface.pfio an older or somehow different library with the spi library performing some special communications?

Again, thanks for your help and the url for the module-search-path.

Lou

pifacedigitalio is the new library. piface.pfio is the older (2012) library.

You can find all of the official PiFace software here: https://github.com/piface