The Problem

DearPyGui, available at https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui, is a robust and speedy Graphical User Interface (GUI) toolkit designed for Python, boasting minimal dependencies. I’ve been keen to integrate it as the primary library for my AstroPitography GUI. However, a hurdle emerged - it lacks compatibility with the 32-bit Buster Raspberry Pi operating system running on my RPi 3B+.

This blog post serves as a comprehensive guide detailing the steps necessary to compile the DearPyGui library on the 32-bit architecture of a Raspberry Pi, specifically the 3B+. While its primary purpose is to serve as a personal reference for potential future endeavors, I also hope it proves beneficial for others who have found themselves scouring the internet for hours in search of a solution.

Create a Swap File

Initially I did not worry about swap memory but I ran into OOM errors when trying to compile DearPyGui which was a direct consequence of the limited 1GB RAM of the Raspberry Pi 3B+. We are going to create temporary storage space on the SD card using a swap file to act as more RAM for the compilation process. This file is going to swap a section of RAM storage for an idle program and free up memory for other programs.

1. First Create an empty file to use for our swap, Note we set the size of the file as 4GiB by: 1K * 4M = 4 GiB.

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   sudo mkdir -v /var/cache/swap cd /var/cache/swap sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1K count=4M sudo chmod 600 swapfile

2. Convert the newly created file into a swap space file.

   1	sudo mkswap swapfile

3. Enable the swap file for paging and swapping.

   1	sudo swapon swapfile

4. Add the swap file into the fstab file to make it persistent on the next system boot, if required.

   1	echo "/var/cache/swap/swapfile none swap sw 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

5. Restart the Raspberry Pi and the new swap file will be ready to use. This can be checked using.

   1	top -bn1 | grep -i swap

   and you should see the line.

   1	KiB Swap: 4194300 total

Locally Compile DearPyGui

1. The first step is to set the Raspberry Pi into “Legacy” mode in raspi-config.

2. Install the following libraries using sudo apt-get install PACKAGE. Make sure you are also using python >= 3.6.

   1. git
   2. cmake
   3. libglu1-mesa-dev
   4. libgl1-mesa-dev
   5. libxrandr-dev
   6. libxinerama-dev
   7. libxcursor-dev
   8. libxi-dev

3. Clone the DearPyGui repository into a local directory using git.

   1	git clone --recursive https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui

4. Change directory into the new DearPyGui folder directory and run the following.

   1	python3 -m setup bdist_wheel --plat-name linux_armv7l --dist-dir ../dist

   If this is successful a wheel file will be found in ../dist. Note that the platform name, linux_armv7l is very important. pip considers the name of the resultant wheel file when checking if it can be compiled on the currently available architecture. It will check for linux_arm7l when installing.

Install DearPyGui

We now install the wheel file using pip.

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pip install WHEEL FILE

If successful you should now be able to import DearPyGui in Python.

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import dearpygui