Setting up your RaspberryPi

This guide assumes you have a fresh install of Ubuntu Server (either 22.04 or 23.10) and that you have successfully ssh-ed into your device.

Setting up your device for Python developemnet

We are going to use pyenv to manage different Python versions and to create an environment. First, we need to install some system dependencies

sudo apt update
# the last package is needed for whisper
sudo apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libreadline-dev libbz2-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev libsndfile1

Create Python environment with pyenv:

# Ensure you have installed pyenv, else do the below:
git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

# Install python 3.9+
pyenv install 3.9.17

# Install pyenv virtual env plugin
git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv.git $(pyenv root)/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv
# Restart your shell
exec "$SHELL"

# Create the environment
pyenv virtualenv 3.9.17 flower-whisperer

Installing the dependencies for Whisper+Flower

With our environmnet ready, let’s install the dependencies. Please note that at the time of writing, PyTorch 2.0+ won’t work properly on aarm64. Because of this, we’ll be using an earlier version of this package.

# activate your environment
pyenv activate flower-whisperer

# install pytorch (RPi aren't ready for PyTorch 2.0+ apparently...)
pip install torch==1.13.1
# install rest of requirerments
pip install -r requirements.txt