Table Of Contents

• Installation on Raspberry Pi
  • Installation components
    • Installing Python
      • Raspbian Jessie/Stretch/Buster
      • Arch Linux ARM
    • Source installation Dependencies
      • Raspbian Jessie/Stretch/Buster
        • Cross-Compilation for Raspberry Pi 1-3 headless installation on Raspbian Buster
        • Raspberry Pi 4 headless installation on Raspbian Buster
  • Hardware acceleration
  • Raspberry Pi window provider and GL backend
  • Change the default screen to use
  • Using Official RPi touch display

Installation on Raspberry Pi

To install Kivy on the RPi using pip, please follow the main installation guide.

Installation components

Following, are additional information linked to from some of the steps in the main pip installation guide, specific to the RPi.

Installing Python

Python and python-pip must be installed from the package manager:

Raspbian Jessie/Stretch/Buster

Using apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-setuptools git-core python3-dev

Arch Linux ARM

Images to use:

http://raspex.exton.se/?p=859 (recommended)
https://archlinuxarm.org/

Using pacman:

sudo pacman -Syu
# Note: python-setuptools needs to be installed through pacman or it will result with conflicts!
sudo pacman -S python-setuptools

# Install pip from source
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
# or curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py

Source installation Dependencies

To install Kivy from source, please follow the installation guide until you reach the Kivy install step and then install the dependencies below before continuing.

Raspbian Jessie/Stretch/Buster

Using apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install pkg-config libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev \
   libgstreamer1.0-dev \
   gstreamer1.0-plugins-{bad,base,good,ugly} \
   gstreamer1.0-{omx,alsa} libmtdev-dev \
   xclip xsel libjpeg-dev

Cross-Compilation for Raspberry Pi 1-3 headless installation on Raspbian Buster

The Raspberry OS project uses pi-gen project to create bootable images for Raspberry PI.

Kivy determines automatically the sub-packages to build based on the environment it is compiled within. By default, the egl_rpi renderer that uses the (now deprecated but still useful) DISPMANX API is only compiled when running on a Raspberry Pi. In order to build Kivy in such pi-gen environment, the auto-detection of the Raspberry Pi hardware version needs to be disabled.

When cross-compiling using e.g. pi-gen, the build system can be forced into compiling for Raspberry Pi with egl_rpi support by setting the environment variable KIVY_RPI_VERSION to any number < 4, e.g. 3.

The install command then looks something like this:

apt install build-essential libraspberrypi-dev raspberrypi-kernel-headers
KIVY_RPI_VERSION=3 python -m pip install "kivy[base]" kivy_examples --no-binary kivy

Please note that the egl_rpi window handler is not supported on Raspberry Pi 4 and higher. The existing version check will refuse to compile the egl_rpi provider when detecting or forcing the Raspberry Pi version to 4 or higher.

Raspberry Pi 4 headless installation on Raspbian Buster

If you run Kivy from the console and not from a desktop environment, you need to compile SDL2 with the kmsdrm backend. This is not the default, so you need add a few extra requirements, and then edit the build script located at tools/build_linux_dependencies.sh accordingly.

Extra install requirements:

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libudev-dev libasound2-dev liblzma-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev libwebp-dev git build-essential
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-ibus-1.0 libdbus-1-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libibus-1.0-5 libibus-1.0-dev libice-dev libsm-dev libsndio-dev libwayland-bin libwayland-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxrandr-dev libxss-dev libxt-dev libxv-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-scrnsaver-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev

Extra flags for configure step of -- Build SDL2 build phase

--enable-video-kmsdrm --disable-video-opengl --disable-video-x11 --disable-video-rpi

Hardware acceleration

If you are getting output similar to this when running your app:

[INFO   ] GL: OpenGL vendor <b'VMware, Inc.'>
[INFO   ] GL: OpenGL renderer <b'llvmpipe (LLVM 9.0.1, 128 bits)'>

Then it means that the renderer is NOT hardware accelerated. This can be fixed by adding your user to the render group:

sudo adduser "$USER" render

You will then see an output similar to this:

[INFO   ] GL: OpenGL vendor <b'Broadcom'>
[INFO   ] GL: OpenGL renderer <b'V3D 4.2'>

Raspberry Pi window provider and GL backend

By default the Raspberry Pi 1-3 will use the egl_rpi window provider and the gl GL backend.

Since the egl_rpi window provider is not available on the Raspberry Pi 4 it uses the sdl2 window provider and the sdl2 GL backend by default.

The window provider and GL backend can be changed at runtime by setting the KIVY_WINDOW and KIVY_GL_BACKEND environmental variables.

The table below shows the supported combinations of window provider and GL backend on the 4 platforms:

Window provider (KIVY_WINDOW=)	GL backend (KIVY_GL_BACKEND=)	RPi 1	RPi 2	RPi 3	RPi 4
sdl2	sdl2/gl	y	y	y	y
x11	gl	y	y	y	y
egl_rpi	gl	y	y	y	n

Change the default screen to use

You can set an environment variable named KIVY_BCM_DISPMANX_ID in order to change the display used to run Kivy. For example, to force the display to be HDMI, use:

KIVY_BCM_DISPMANX_ID=2 python3 main.py

Check Controlling the environment to see all the possible values.

Using Official RPi touch display

If you are using the official Raspberry Pi touch display, you need to configure Kivy to use it as an input source. To do this, edit the file ~/.kivy/config.ini and go to the [input] section. Add this:

mouse = mouse
mtdev_%(name)s = probesysfs,provider=mtdev
hid_%(name)s = probesysfs,provider=hidinput

For more information about configuring Kivy, see Configure Kivy