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!