Recommendations for use with Raspberry Pi

[sgbaird]

I have an automated liquid handler that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B. I'm able to run Python code on it. Any recommendations on how to set up remote access to various commands via Prefect? I.e., there's an API on the system and I'd like to expose several of those functions there. Curious if anyone has had experience using Prefect on an RPi.

[devangrose]

I just went through setting up Prefect on an RPi last week.

What you'll probably want is to set up a worker on the raspberry pi, although I'm not sure how the local worker interacts with the API on system. Might be worth a shot though!

What I did was install a single-node kubernetes cluster on my RPi and deployed a Prefect worker to that cluster, it only took me about 15 minutes and I have very minimal kubernetes experience. Here's the guides I used.

Kubernetes quick start

Helm installation (I did the "from script" option)

Add Prefect worker to the cluster with helm

You may be able to use a process worker instead of a cluster worker as well - would be less resource intensive.

[sgbaird]

This is great, and definitely something we'll be keeping in mind. Could you clarify, are there any alternatives you tried? E.g., pip install prefect. A video walkthrough for what you described would be amazing 🥲

[yakavetsiv]

I’m currently running two Raspberry Pi 5 devices, each connected to the COM interfaces of automated equipment, with a local Prefect server. I installed Prefect in a virtual environment and set up an Outrun service to ensure the server restarts automatically upon deployment. I’ve also read that you can run Docker and mount external devices, such as USB and COM ports, to the Docker container in order to send API commands to the hardware.