How do I install the piFace Control & Display

Question

I bought one of these (PiFace Control & Display) and according to the online instructions here, it says to run:

apt-get install python3-pifacecad

but when I do that I get:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python3-pifacecad

I've checked my repositiories in /etc/apt/sources.list and they match the repositories listed here.

deb http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free

I've also run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. What else do I need to do? I'm running raspian wheezy but it is a scaled down (minimalized) version which I got from here. Perhaps I am missing something.

Answer 1

I did manage to get this working, but only by cloning the project directly from github.

Even then I still had further problems relating to dependencies which were incorrect. The python code seems to reference a lirc module which doesn't seem to exist. I did find a pylirc module which I installed with apt-get install python-pylirc.

Ultimately I had to change references in the source python that read import lirc to import pylirc as lirc, apparently because the name of the dependency changed since the code was last updated(??)

EDIT: Aha! This seemed to help me get the original distro according to the user manual:

echo "deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/raspberrypi.gpg.key
apt-key add raspberrypi.gpg.key
apt-get update 

Then I was able to:

apt-get install python{,3}-pifacecad

which installs the proper dependency: python-lirc among others.

Answer 2

Posting on this ancient question because it is still or again an issue with PiFace Control and Display boards purchased recently.

I had success with installing the python module using pip to install it straight from GutHub:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/piface/pifacecad.git

You'll need to install the pre-requisites ( git+https://github.com/piface/pifacecommon.git and lirc) as well.

References:

• https://github.com/piface/pifacecad
• https://github.com/piface/pifacecad/issues/33