Setting up your macOS environment for Darcy AI development
You can use any macOS environment to build Darcy AI applications . After you finish setting up your Mac as a development environment, you will be able to write, test, and debug your Darcy AI apps. Then you can package your code and deploy the applications to any edge device!
What you will need
- macOS laptop or desktop (both x86 and M1 processor Macs will work)
- A video camera that you want to use (the built-in webcam works very well for this purpose)
- 5GB or more of free disk space to accommodate code libraries and application container images
- Any IDE software that will allow you to write and debug Python (use your favorite IDE)
Install Python 3.6.9 or greater
If you do not already have Python version 3.6.9 or greater, you will need to install it now. Darcy
AI requires this version of Python or higher. Note that Python 2.x versions are also not compatible
with Darcy AI. You need Python 3 and the darcyai
library will not install with versions below
3.6.9.
Download and install the latest or your preferred version of Python3 from Python.org directly https://www.python.org/downloads/macos/ .
If you have both Python 2.x versions and Python 3.x versions on your Mac, you may need to
use python3
and pip3
for all of the commands instead of just python
and pip
. You can change
this if you want by following this
guide
https://osxdaily.com/2022/02/15/make-python-3-default-macos/
.
Install OpenCV
Install the OpenCV package for Python with the command pip install opencv-python
Install the Pillow library
Install the Pillow package for Python with the command pip install Pillow
.
Install the Numpy library
Install the numpy package for Python with the command pip install numpy
.
Install the imutils library
Install the imutils package for Python with the command pip install imutils
.
Install the DarcyAI library
Install the Darcy AI library for Python with the command pip install darcyai
.
Install Docker for Mac
If you don’t already have Docker on your Mac, install it now by following the official instructions https://docs.docker.com/desktop/mac/install/ .
After you have installed Docker, you can use docker
commands in terminal. You will be using these
commands to package your Darcy AI applications for deployment, including deploying to edge devices
that are a different CPU architecture than your Mac! To make sure you can use the latest Docker
build commands like buildx
you can add an environment variable to your Mac with the following
command export DOCKER_CLI_EXPERIMENTAL=enabled
. This will tell Docker to allow use of the latest
tools which will save you a lot of time when packaging your apps!
Note that you may need to use sudo docker
instead of just docker
depending on how you install
and set up Docker for Mac. If that is the case on your development machine, you can just add sudo
to the beginning of any docker
commands shown in these guides.
Install TensorFlow
Install TensorFlow for Python with the command pip install tensorflow
Start building your AI applications with Darcy
Go to the Build Guide and get started building with Darcy AI!