Packing pixi environments for the Raspberry Pi

[stephane-caron]

If you have configured your Upkie as a Wi-Fi access point, chances are, you have already faced the issue of installing conda packages without an Internet connection. One solution is to connect to the Internet via a separate Wi-Fi dongle, but it will become tedious if the need arises too often. In what follows, we propose a way to use the Internet connection of your host computer instead.

Using pixi and pixi-pack

We use pixi and a tool called pixi-pack to export pixi environments to Upkie. If you don't have it yet, you can install pixi from here.

First, we will want to create an environment.tar file. Define a pack-to-upkie task as done for instance in the pyproject.toml of the PPO balancer, then run the following command:

pixi run pack-to-upkie

Once the file is created, upload it to your Upkie and unpack it by:

pixi-pack unpack environment.tar

If pixi-pack is not installed on your Upkie, you can get a pixi-pack-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu binary from the pixi-pack release page. Finally, activate the environment and run the agent:

source ./activate.sh
python ppo_balancer/run.py

See also

• This note follows a previous attempt where we packed conda environments (NB: using pixi-pack is much better)

[traversaro]

If pixi-pack is not installed on your Upkie, you can get a pixi-pack-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu binary from the pixi-pack release page.

Since 0.3.0, pixi-pack also support creating self-extracting archives, see https://github.com/Quantco/pixi-pack/tree/v0.3.0?tab=readme-ov-file#self-extracting-binaries , thanks to the great work of @prsabahrami and @pavelzw .