🗂 Archived project — original page from 2014–2017 · ← back to main page

🐍 KivyPie

Kivy on the Raspberry PI — the official distro of its era, native-speed Python touch apps on a $35 board

GitHub source →about Kivy →

What it was

Kivy is a Python framework for multitouch apps — GPUs doing real work for Python. KivyPie was the official Raspberry PI distro to run Kivy: I took the pipaOS base, added the Kivy framework compiled against the PI's GLES2 stack, and shipped it as a burnable image with full dev tools included. It even worked with the official Raspberry PI touch display.

Nine releases between 2014 and 2016 (0.3 to 1.0), each one a downloadable zip. Downloads were served from this very family of web pages — back when the whole place lived on mitako.eu.

In the image

Get running

  1. Download the newest KivyPie image (kivy-pie-1.0.zip in the original archive)
  2. Burn it to your SD Card
  3. Boot and log in as sysop, password posys
  4. You are ready to Kivy Pie!

Where do I learn Kivy?

Start with Kivy's getting started, play with the gallery samples included in KivyPie, and browse the community threads. The hardest part was always stopping.

Why it mattered

Kivy on the PI meant pixels on screen straight from touchgfx.py — no cross compiler, no custom kernel build, no 40-page setup guide. The distro handled the details so the community could build apps. That is what a good distro does: it gets out of the way.

Kivy is released under the MIT license; KivyPie under GPLv2. Raspberry PI is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.