Optional libraries

Smaller is better!

The Groundlight SDK is optimized to run on small edge devices. As such, you can use the Groundlight SDK without installing large libraries like numpy or OpenCV.

But if you're already installing them, we'll use them. Our SDK detects if these libraries are installed and will make use of them if they're present. If not, we'll gracefully degrade, and tell you what's wrong if you try to use these features.

PIL - optional but default installed

The PIL library offers a bunch of standard utilities for working with images in python. The Groundlight SDK can work without PIL.

Because PIL is not very large, and is quite useful, we install it by default with the normal build of the Groundlight SDK. So when you

pip3 install groundlight

it comes with the pillow version of the PIL library already installed.

Working without PIL

If you are extremely space constrained, you can install the Groundlight SDK from source without PIL and it will work properly, but with reduced functionality. Specifically, you will need to convert your images into JPEG format yourself. The SDK normally relies on PIL to do JPEG compression (which is a non-trivial algorithm), and the API requires images to be in JPEG format. However on space-constrained platforms, sometimes this conversion is done in hardware, and so we don't want to force you to install PIL if you don't need it.

Numpy, OpenCV - fully optional

These commonly-used libraries are not installed by default, because they are quite large, and their installation can often cause conflicts with other dependent libraries. If you want to use them, install them directly.