General Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting tips and tricks
Last updated
Troubleshooting tips and tricks
Last updated
This section is grouped by Device to help you quickly find the information you need.
Your Mycroft device will sync settings with the home.mycroft.ai server regularly. In normal circumstances any change should be reflected on the device within 1-2 minutes.
You can also instruct your device to pull down the latest configuration, by saying:
Hey Mycroft, update configuration
Mycroft will respond in one of two ways:
If your configuration was out of date, and has been pulled down again, Mycroft will respond:
Configuration updated
If your configuration was the same on your device as on home.mycroft.ai, Mycroft will respond:
Your device has been configured
To see the settings that your device is using requires access to the devices shell (terminal). You can do this by SSHing into your device, or connecting a keyboard and monitor.
The configuration values in use by the system can be obtained using the Configuration Managers get command.
The settings values that have been retrieved from home.mycroft.ai can also be read directly from /var/tmp/mycroft_web_cache.json. See mycroft.conf for more details.
To obtain your devices IP address you can say:
Hey Mycroft, what is your IP?
Alternatively you can get the IP address from your router, or by scanning the network using a tool like nmap. Running nmap with the no port scan flag -sn returns the IP and MAC addresses, as well as the vendor name. A Mark 1 will display as "Raspberry Pi Foundation".
If you are experiencing any issues with your Mark II or Mark II Dev Kit, troubleshooting information is available in the Mark II documentation:
Mark 1 attempts to update its software around every hour or so. Yellow Eyes, part of the Mark 1 boot sequence, occurs when either the software for the Mark 1 or the Skills on the device did not update properly. Generally the solution for Yellow Eyes is to "hard reboot" the Mark 1 - that is, remove the power cable, wait at least 30 seconds, then plug the device back in.
It may take several "hard reboots" to clear the Yellow Eyes symptom.
If you have connected Mark 1 to a HDMI output, and nothing is showing on the HDMI screen, reboot the Mark 1. The Mark 1 needs to reboot before it can output to a HDMI screen.
If your Mark 1 has previously been connected to the internet, and loses internet connectivity, it will speak
I have lost connection to the internet
ssh into Mark 1If you ssh into Mark 1, (instructions here), and have recently reset the device to factory defaults, then you will need to re-enable ssh.
Press the Mark 1's top button and turn it to SSH, then press the button. Select ENABLE then press the button again to enable ssh.
ssh operates on port 22. Here is an nmap scan of a Mark 1 with ssh enabled sitting on IP address 192.168.0.2:
Some custom installations of Python (with systems such as pyenv) may get this error when running the interactive Mycroft terminal client. This error occurs because curses wide character support hasn't been fully built into the custom Python installation.
The following explanation and instructions are specific to Ubuntu Linux (where this issue was found) but can be used as a general guide for other distributions as needed.
To resolve this issue, make sure that the following packages are installed:
These packages provide "shared libraries for terminal handling (wide character support)".
After these packages are installed, recompile your Python installation. For pyenv, the command would be:
It will ask for confirmation that you want to rebuild the Python version. After confirming the rebuild, your new Python installation should no longer show the above error when running the Mycroft terminal client.
If your CLI won't run, it is highly likely to be an issue with the Mycroft virtual environment. The easiest solution we've found has been to remove and reinstall the virtual environment.
First, delete the existing virtual environment:
Next, we run the setup script again:
This will rebuild your virtual environment.
When running dev_setup.sh, if you encounter a warning about a "bad interpreter", it is likely from having a space in the installation path:
If you can't install to a path without spaces, you will have to manually verify the requirements.txt entries are installed to your virtual environment.
This most likely indicates that your unicode locale is not set.
If you are using Docker, ensure that you have a section in your Dockerfile setting up the locale such as:
It has also been reported that connecting to a machine using RDP was a possible work around 🤷
ERROR - Failed to load skillIf you're developing a Skill, and run it for the first time, you may encounter an error similar to the below:
The error here is that the file system permission on the Skill's directory are incorrect. The directory should have owner and group permissions of mycroft:mycroft as per the below.
If your permissions are different to those shown above, change them by running the following commands: