Google-cloud-python: Can't install Speech API Python client on Raspberry Pi 3

[aazimh]

1. OS type and version - Raspbian Pixel
2. Python version and virtual environment information python --version - 2.7.9

Hi guys,

Trying to install the Speech API Python client on my Raspberry Pi 3 but running into installation issues. When I try

pip install --upgrade google-cloud-speech

it starts the install process, but hangs when it comes to building the grpcio dependency and doesn't move forward until I cancel. Exact line is:

Running setup.py bdist_wheel for grpcio ...

and that's where it gets stuck. I did some Googling and it looks like there's a problem with grpc on ARM processors, so is there any way to get around this and have the Python client installed on my Pi? Would appreciate any help! I understand the library is in Alpha so this issue may not even have a fix, but just wanted to see if there might be.

Thanks,
Aazim.

[tseaver]

While it is possible to disable the library's use of GRPC (via setting the GOOGLE_CLOUD_DISABLE_GRPC environment variable), we don't support installing without the grpcio library. Please open an issue against the gprc repository requesting raspbian wheels for the Python grpcio library.

[dhermes]

@aazimh I'm fairly certain you'll be able to get it installed from source via:

$ git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-python/
$ cd google-cloud-python/speech
$ virtualenv ${VENV}
$ source ${VENV}/bin/activate
(...VENV...) $ ${VENV}/bin/python setup.py install

But that command may stall grpcio. I suppose in that case you could always install a fake grpcio package.

[aazimh]

@dhermes Would that not do the same thing as installing via pip? If not, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Have no idea how I would go about installing a fake package :) for now, I'm going to go the long way around and try and use REST calls via the requests module in Python.

[dhermes]

setup.py will use setuptools directly, which can have different behavior than pip (a not so fun quirk, packaging is no fun sometimes).

pip install --no-deps would (probably) also do the trick for you

[lukesneeringer]

I'm fairly certain you'll be able to get it installed from source

On a RaspPi? Sure, but it will be 2019 before it completes. ;-)

[lukesneeringer]

For tracking purposes: @aazimh did open an issue on GRPC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/10793

[aazimh]

And it worked! I was just being impatient :) thanks for pointing me in the right direction guys!

[sphirke]

I am facing the same issue while installing firebase-admin.
I am trying to install firebase-admin package in my raspberry pi zero w.
While I used command sudo pip install firebase-admin, it is stuck on below line,
running setup.py bdist_wheel for grpcio ...

@aazimh as you have mentioned it was completed after waiting a long... how much time would it take to complete... any idea?

Appreciate your help.

[skumarlabs]

I am facing the same issue while installing firebase-admin.
I am trying to install firebase-admin package in my raspberry pi zero w.
While I used command sudo pip install firebase-admin, it is stuck on below line,
running setup.py bdist_wheel for grpcio ...

@aazimh as you have mentioned it was completed after waiting a long... how much time would it take to complete... any idea?

Appreciate your help.

For anyone else facing the issue, for me, it took ~58 minutes on raspberry pi 3B+ on desktop boot..

[surak]

Raspbian has a python-grpcio package, which is older than 1.29.x, so that won't work:

Collecting grpcio<2.0dev,>=1.29.0; extra == "grpc" (from google-api-core[grpc]<2.0.0dev,>=1.14.0->google-cloud-vision)

Turns out that compiling from source always fail on a raspberry pi zero as of december 2020