Software for PiFace

Question

I have just bought a PiFace board but after two days of trying I cannot obtain any software to run it. I have tried https:// github.com and it returns "no such file or directory. I've tried PiFace Digital, "Getting Started with PiFace Digital in less than ten minutes", on the page starting "you can always enable the SPi driver .................. The software appears to have downloaded and installed but the PiFace Emulator doesn't work. (I used the command piface/scripts/piface_emulator) and it returned "no such file or directory".

Can someone spot where I'm going wrong please?

e14 Contributor · Answer

Dear Tom, I have updated Raspbian and installed pifacedigitalio following your advice. Unfortunately blink.py failed with the report "no such file or directory". It seems that all along I've been having that report so I still need help I'm afraid. My home/pi directory at present contains the folders: indiecity, Squeak RPi.GPIO RPi.GPIO .0.5.3a piface Desktop Documents scratch Python Games python3_pifacecommon_4,0,0-1_all(1).deb ocr_pi.png data.tar.gz install_scratch_GPIO.sh install.txt debian-binary contro.tar.gz pure13.0.2.55 8en_gb.exe

rigpa · Answer

This somehow solved it for me : (found this on GitHub) https://github.com/piface/pifacecommon/issues/7

... Don't know what caused the SPI module to be missing in the first place, and don't know what exactly fixed it, but oh well, it works now.

grillo7 commented on Mar 31, 2014

Tom
I have solved it by installing spidev0 and spidev0.1 files with this proccedure:
http://neophob.com/2012/08/raspberry-pi-enable-the-spi-device/
I don't know why, but the original distribution of raspbian doesnt include it, you can even set SPI true in the raspi-config screen, but it doesnt work if the spidev0 and pidev0.1 files are not installed. Maybe it coul be nice if the instalation of pifacedigital-emulator could verify if and if it is missing, then auto installing.
Another little issue I found in the spidev0 instalation proccedure, is that you have to install/upgrade firmware files, then other devices depending on the version istalled(like wifi dongle in my case) can be misconfiguerd.